I do agree that MS Office won’t work on any platform except Windows and Mac for now. In terms of collaboration, it has SharePoint. I believe that the web version of Office Suite will work on other client platforms when Microsoft’s underlying office document standard becomes one of the ISO standards, in addition to OpenDoc. To protect its server market, Microsoft would not support UNIX and the like. It could when it changes its mind. Xenix was Microsoft’s version of UNIX! Mac’s OS is practically a UNIX now. It won’t be too difficult for Microsoft to make MS Office to run on UNIX or its variant. Interesing enough, IBM’s AS/400 and Sun’s Workstation did have an optional emulation board to run MS Windows inside their machines! Linux desktop doesn’t seem to go anywhere. There were two versions of Window Manager in UNIX world - one was Motif and the other was OpenLook. With Mac, it has a third one. The underlying window API is still x-window, which was written mostly by DEC and donated to MIT as its owner. I did look into UNIX for clients back in late 80s and early 90s, but the software running on UNIX was too expensive. For instance, WordPerfect on UNIX was at least twice as expensive as a Windows version for a PC workstation. Moreover, an x-terminal (diskless workstation) was more expensive than a PC - double for a monochrome and 4 times for a colour one!

Office Suite does work within a browser - IE on the Windows PC. The Mac version may work too, but I am not sure, for I haven’t touched a Mac since 1987. It was too expensive to own a Mac at that time and it still is! If you want to have the Microsoft Office Suite working on an UNIX-like platform, it is not there yet. There was a company working on migrating .Net to other platforms, as part of it became an EMAC standard. Not like Java, Sun would not relinguish the control of it. Sun, in fact, withdrew its ISO accreditation for Java in the last minute. As far as I am concerned, Java is a proprietary environment and language in the computer world! Sun may let you do a lot of extensions, but it has the absolute right to stop any extensions as it did in one of the Embedded Java meetings. Sun told NIST that what it proposed was an infringement of Sun’s intellectual property. How arrogant a corporation can it be! It looks like that Sun has gone down the same path as IBM did back in the 60’s. I am waiting to see when Sun starts collecting patent fees from every vendor and user! It will be similar to MP4. Part of the cost in producing an MP4 file goes to its patent owner! In effect, every MP4 based song or video you play in your iPod, you have already paid for its patent fee, at least indirectly. Luckily, W3C would not accredit any patent fee collectible standard!

In terms of collaboration, Microsoft’s answer to IBM’s Lotus Note and Domino was IIS, Exchange, SharePoint, OneNote, and InfoPath. In answering to Netware, Microsoft moved to DNS based directory structure. Practically, no one talks about Netware these days! Even IBM’s Global Services has a dedicated group of certified MCSEs to serve its world-wide clients or customers. IBM was smart enough not jumping 100% into Java based open source. It is also a big player in the Microsoft’s Windows arena to make money.

In terms of open source movement, companies specialized on Windows platforms are starting to offer free software for download. Microsoft led the way by offering its software development environment in seperate packages for free! As more .Net open source software become available, I would use a compiled software instead of Java based software on my Windows machine. I can’t afford to buy a Mac and I hate to waste time to configure and support a Linux platform. Don’t forget, 90% of workstations are Windows, 9% are Mac, and the rest, whatever they are!

Best regards,
 Francis

I must disagree. Microsoft does not have a version of Microsoft Office that you can use online with any web browser, on any platform. If you’ve seen it working, please let me know where I can buy it, for I’d love to give it a try. Even though patterns repeat themselves, not everything remains the same, and each cycle in the pendulum’s oscillations brings its fair share of progress. The online version of ThinkFree is a lot better than any office productivity suite that was available in the early 90’s. It’s not yet on par with Microsoft Office 2007 in terms of features, but it has some that offline versions of Microsoft Office will never be able to provide, especially with respect to collaboration and mobility. To me, the trade-off goes in favor of online alternatives.

Best regards
 -Ismael

You’ve got a lot of good points, but I must disagree with your overall thesis. To me, the real issue of working offline is not getting access to data, but getting access to applications. Data is useless without supporting applications. And the more your applications rely on web services and foster collaboration, the less they becomes accessible offline. What would be an offline version of Google’s search engine? Something pretty useless. Have you tried the offline version of Salesforce.com? It’s utterly unusable as soon as you want access to custom objects.

Reality is, we’re moving to an online world, and trying to deal with offline considerations makes this move a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Granted, Lotus Notes has pretty good synchronization, but it only works for Lotus Notes users, not across an ecosystem of applications developed by multiple vendors. And standards won’t help there, for the issue has less to do with APIs, and more to do with core application design. The same is true for Mac OS X applications working with iSync: only the most trivial data sets are supported. As soon as you move toward more complex ones, the architecture breaks.

To me, connectivity will evolve the way that electricity did. Pretty soon, we will reach a tipping point when connectivity becomes a commodity, and we won’t look for alternatives. The real question is whether this point is five, ten, or twenty five years down the road. My vote goes for five. What’s yours?

Best regards
 -Ismael

It looks like Microsoft and its competitors are converging to a similar user experience model—running applications inside a browser. Office 97 was the first office suite that could work within IE. Office 2007 can work both in workstation and SaaS modes. The equivalent of SaaS was introduced a long time ago when Microsoft talked about subscription service, kind of an ASP (Application Service Provider) model for Office Suite after it released Office 95. MSN Live is the first attempt by Microsoft to provide an Office subscription service. Microsoft did try to push the subscription service model to large corporations, including government agencies, but customers would not get on board with the subscription service for a variety of reasons. This is very similar to IBM’s push to retire MVS, but large customers refused to move off MVS as they had spent millions of dollars to remove the Y2K bug from software less than 10 years ago!

It looks like Office 3.0 will be a hybrid computing model of online and offline web services. The X-terminal equivalent (workstation with no disk) promoted by Oracle and Sun will be dead again! In the end, I believe that a compiled software (e.g. Office 2007) will beat interpreted software (Java based) in terms of performance on the same platform.

It was interesting to see that many cute acronymns cropped up, but they are just the same old practices wrapped in new packages. There are only two basic business models—a customer either buys or rents a product! It all depends on the economics of ownership.

I’m not trying to hammer it in, but maybe you should have a look at Firefox 3 rumors and Google Apps. They seem to be aiming for offline.

“Told you so !”

-Rup

You raised many valid and excellent points on accessibility and synchronization.

Personally, I won’t hold my breath on my ISP’s reliability of access to the Internet. We have only two ISPs to choose from—Sympatico (part of Bell Canada) and Cable Company (one in each market). When it rains cats and dogs, both ISPs go down for hours, if not days.

Ismael has many gadgets to access the Internet; namely, Apple, iPhone, Blackberry, etc. He has land-line, wireless, and possibly satellite access with no single point of failure. It is unrealitic to expect everyone has a similar set of equipments like his!

Synchrozination consists of three fundamenal problems: 1) time, 2) content, and 3) schema (data compatibility as you call it). The web user interface (AJAX and SOA) addresses primarily the interaction between an individual user with the server (machine). It addresses neither collaboration nor multi-lingual operations. Moreover, the current Office 2.0 (or 2.5) and Web 2.0 miss the security dimension.

After the Year 2K millenium software upgrade, dot com bust followed. The second coming of dot com bust is already looming on the horizon. This time we will see how many open-source enterprises will survive! I’m quite sure that IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and the like will survive, as they play in both the proprietary and open-source markets. I am quite sure that Apple will survive too, as Microsoft will not let it go under for any reason.

The Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 movements seem to widen the gap of the digital divide. Motorola, Microsoft & McCaw invested heavily in LEOS (Low Elevation Orbital Sattelites) to promote remote access to the Internet for locations with very little or no infrastructures. Motorola’s LEOS were up and running for a couple of years, but never made any money. China and the European Union have teamed up to build another GPS sattelite network to offset the U.S. monopoly. With urban mesh wireless network, Internet over the electric transmission grid, LEOS, and GPS, no single point of failure in Internet access may become a reality economically!

Best regards
 -Francis

I’m afraid I do not agree with this. As you say higher up, the real difficulty is synchronizing multiple, remote servers, at different times, which are not necessarily online at the same time, etc. But hell, this has worked for Lotus Notes users for years, hasn’t it? I mean, please let’s not re-invent the wheel and create problems which have already been solved by previous generations of software architects.

Difficulties in synchronizing data are due to multiple updates to the same item; thus the great debate on lock+checkout (at the risk of someone never releasing the lock) or modify+sync+resolve conflicts. As usual, even in the days of CVS, conflicts may only be solved by a phone call (or email or IM chat), which is good for the way the company works; at last, a good reason to call another buddy on the other side of the planet and talk about real business, not just poor network/intranet performances or incorrect access rights.

As most Mac users have already understood, there are several reasons for this :

- Offline vs. online
- Useability of web GUIs
- Data model compatibility of different web services
- Simultaneous availability of multiple web services

Offline vs. Online

To use Office 2.0, you need to be online: trivial ! But there are several reasons why you may not be or want to be online: your Internet access is down just at the wrong moment, you know when you need to send that last minute order to a supplier/partner to kick-in before the cut-off, before the truck starts off on its delivery round.

Do you really want your business to rely on the uptime of your Internet access or, if you are a SO.HO, of your ISP/telephone provider? You might also just be in an airport, a taxi, or somewhere where you just do not want to send your order through unknown wires, but do have time to do you back-office preparation work.

Office 2.5 needs to work offline—except when not possible, of course, for example when you submit work to shared business processes implemented in your online workflow engine.

Useability of Web GUIs

Yeah, AJAX is cool, web application are getting really sexy, etc. But wait, remember your PC or Mac interface? Even the dullest of those is better han the latest AJAX frills: response time, multiwindowing, graphical guidelines, etc. When you have worked on a Mac, you know what productivity is about, and most of that is provided by a good man-machine interaction: drag and drop, fast dynamic menus, graphical interaction where needed, and, above all, consistency! Today, each Office 2.0 has different GUI guidelines—mind you, more and more Mac applications are stepping out of Apple’s own guidelines…

So, any local Mac application has a better GUI than the best Office 2.0 service.

Data Model Compatibility

Now, for those who use more than one online service, you may have noticed that their data models, for the same service offered, are slightly different: in this situation, the user needs to bridge the gap between them, e.g. Google Calendar and Salesforce.com Events, knowing that this type of information will be stored in one, and that other information will be stored in the other service. And I will not even mention compatibility issues, data model upgrades of one and not the other, etc. An integrator’s nightmare… managed by the end-user?

No, the data model integration and compatibility issues need to be managed by the synchronization applications that have been tested to work together and to pull all the online data back into my (Mac) synchronization engine, into the (Apple) standard, and (developers’) custom schemas—which, by the way, could be standardized by the Office 2.5 movement so that all these services stay compatible—which will also work offline (Cf. first point).

So I need synchronize applications to pull data back into my Mac to maintain data model compatibility.

Simultaneous Availability of Multiple Web Services

Last but not least, the multiple web services I use must all be available at the same time if I am working online, also at the same time as my Internet connection is on. So, in real life, my business is relying on the weakest link in the chain of web services and Internet connections I use. The more web services I use, e.g. to increase my Office 2.0 productivity or to improve my added value, the more I rely on weak links in the chain of my Internet business partners.

Now, I did not really think that this was a big deal, even after the important Salesforce.com Oracle upgrade problems, or others; but the fact is that all these services put together multiply the risk of having one of them unavailable at the wrong moment—Murphy’s law, remember?

So, I need to synchronize all that stuff off the net onto my local Mac to work while others are stuck fixing the bugs in their online services. Yeah, my productivity will decrease, but I will spurt all that work back into the service when it comes back online.

I hope you realize that Office 2.5 will be offline, with the power of local GUIs, the (Mac) synchronization engine providing the data model integration services tested by the suppliers of those synchronized applications, and that most of the work will be done offline, even if the Internet line or the Salesforce.com’s of this world are down.

-Rup

Education is hard. I tend to prefer self-explanatory user interfaces.

Best regards
 -Ismael

I agree that voice recognition is a critical step toward better user/device interactions.

Best regards
 -Ismael

I’m looking forward to your thoughts on the subject. And while we’re at it, I want to say that as much as I dislike synchronization, I am a huge fan of syndication, which I believe is solving part of the problem at hand in a much simpler way.

Best regards
 -Ismael

Good points about Wikis regarding versioning. I need to dig into this some more.

Best regards
 -Ismael