Will Office 2010 Resurrect The Office Suite?
By: Robert Scoble
When I left Microsoft about four years ago, I remember Steve Gillmor telling everyone that Office was dead.
I sort of went along with that, after all I was leaving Microsoft partially because I thought that Microsoft didn’t have an interesting product pipeline and wasn’t going to get the Internet for the second time. Only this time I didn’t sense Bill Gates screaming “turn toward the Internet.” For the most part I was right, at least until this year.
Remember, when a blogger says something is “dead” it just means that it isn’t interesting anymore and/or is potentially going to get disrupted. Well, it’s clear that Office DID get disrupted, if you watch today’s videos that I’ve posted about Office 10.
Who disrupted Office? Apple did. Look at the new PowerPoint and you’ll see Microsoft telling Steve Jobs to “stay off our lawn.”
Who else disrupted Office? Google did. Look at the new Web collaboration features and you’ll see Microsoft telling Eric Schmidt to “stay off our lawn.”
What happened in the four years since I left Microsoft?
1. The amount of strategy taxes have gone down. What are strategy taxes? When a Microsoft product team, like Office, needs to support exclusively technology from another product team, like, say, Internet Explorer or Windows. Here they started the demo in Firefox, which tells me that a good chunk of strategy taxes have been thrown out the window.
2. Microsoft is finally figuring out how to deal with Google. Is Microsoft’s strategy perfect? No, but it’s good enough to stop the bleeding in a range of areas like search and, now, office productivity.
3. Innovation is back. I see lots of things that are damn cool in this suite. Think that copy and paste was over? Watch the video about how Microsoft improved copy and paste. Think email couldn’t be improved? Watch the Outlook 10 video and see just how many new features are there.
4. The Web is finally front and center on the Office team’s mind. Are they completely there yet? No. Will Google continue to be interesting for a range of tasks? Yes. But Microsoft just said to the marketplace that they won’t be outplayed on the Web and that’s pretty huge.
5. It’s not Office alone that will rejuvenate Microsoft. Bing is coming on strong. Xbox is rocking and rolling. Windows 7 looks absolutely superb and is blowing holes in Apple’s strategy, especially at the low end of the market which is much more important this year due to the crappy economy. One area where Microsoft still doesn’t look strong? Mobile. But if the Windows Mobile team makes a few more shifts toward the web it will be a key player there, too.
6. Microsoft has the time to turn its big boat that other companies don’t have. Microsoft has 14 — can you count them all? — billion dollar businesses. I don’t know of another company with that luxury.
7. Microsoft’s R&D is resurgent and is feeling its oats. I’ll have more to say about that later when I get a video up I made in Microsoft’s Cambridge R&D lab last week. But I see lots of things in this Office that came out of Microsoft’s R&D department, which has now been in a great new building for more than a year and is expanding world wide.
Anyway, what caught my eye? I will upgrade just for the new Outlook features. Watch that video to see why. Also the new Web features might get me back from Google Docs. That will be a tougher sale, but you can see tons of places where Microsoft has run way ahead of Google and Zoho here.
Keep in mind, though, that Microsoft’s Office never was dead as a business. In fact I’m pretty sure that in dollar volumes Microsoft sells more today than it did four years ago when it got “boring.” This new version looks like it’ll ensure that Microsoft Office is a successful business for years to come. Some things, it won’t be out until first half of 2010, which gives Google time to respond. Other things? We don’t know pricing and haven’t yet seen all the features revealed or demoed.
Here’s the videos I filmed at the press briefing that Chris Bryant, product manager on the Office 10 team, gave me:
Outlook 10 gets new productivity features:
New copy and paste features in Office 10:
Office 10 brings collaboration features to many devices:
More videos are coming shortly (I have five in total that are uploading now) but TechCrunch has a report on Office 10 now.