837 words about how Office is dead (from Steve Gillmor)

Workflow... wow. That sounds great. Just add a PKI, offline capability, quick development, and you'll be where Lotus Notes was 10 years ago.

Scoble, I love your blog. But sometimes you come off sounding like a right dick.

"Steve also hasn’t been paying attention to our secret weapon: workflow. Try to stick that in your Linux server and smoke it!"

If Microsoft is talking about Workflow like it's something new then you guys have really had your heads in the sand for the last 10 years. And if you really believe you can't achieve workflow automation (or modern equivalents) on Linux then you _really_ need to start looking at your competition.

Ben: stop calling me names and just use this opportunity to advertise the Linux workflow solution! Geez, I put a softball over home plate and you guys decide to throw the ball back at the pitcher. Heh!

Well you did walk right into a brick wall with "our-secret-weapon-workflow". I guess if you don't pay attention to anything ERP, it would seem "new" and a "secret weapon". And actually "workflow" is much better known as (BPM) Business Process Management. Which ecompasses such things as Abydos Designer, Fuego, Compuware UnifaceFlow, Aspen Grove, Bizflow, PlanView Enterprise, WebSphere, Flux, ExtraView, Aapam Workflow, Domino Workflow (Notes)....gah tons more, drawing a blank. Advertise the Linux workflow solution? Geeesus, tons of them. I'd have to drink Gartner for a few days just to process it all.

But heck even Peregrine had some decent workflow software, always liked ServiceCenter, well back before that company went half toast with Enronish games. Now bought out by HP for inclusion into the OpenView systems management suite.

Workflow is not "secret" nor a "weapon".

PS - Why are you even bothering poking him? Gillmor is quite near insane. He ever get out much? Geesh. Office is multi-billion dollars worth of sales. Small Biz, Big Biz, that don't care a rot about AJAX/Google/Web 2.0 syrup. Word, Excel are standard Office docs, it's not going to flip just on account some Web jockeys lucid dreams.

Sorry, it was quite uncivil of me wasn't it :-) But you were mouthing off!

Anyway, one product that I'm aware of is Sonic Orchestration Server from Sonic Software http://www.sonicsoftware.com/ - geared towards orchestrating workflow across an enterprise services bus to faciliate services oriented architectures. And if that's not too much jargon for a Thursday afternoon I don't know what is!

you need to separate a few things when you talk about office. there is the office application, and there are the documents.

personally, i don't care - d.o. n.o.t. c.a.r.e. - what application i use to edit my documents. if g-office or star office edits my documents as well as ms-office, then why would i choose ms-office? if ms-office is simply superior, then of course i'd use that.

the documents themselves are not the issue - except that one day the format will truly become public. and when that happens, who cares about using ms-office? it's just another app.

in the so-called web-centric world, the idea of documents as a method to control and store information simply goes away.

make a purchase online. how many 'documents' did you manage? none, really. if you saved anything, it was saved as a collection of bits on your local machine, and the remote machine handled the rest.

open your e-mail client. how many 'documents' do you see? none, really. they're just e-mails. maybe you'll save an individual e-mail - but i know of no one in the past 2 years who's done so. you print them, and then the paper thing looks like a document - but it's not tied to a file, is it?

if i get my smtp/pop e-mail formatted in a rich text, whether it's RTF, HMTL, or the magical XML, i don't care that it's a 'document.'

i imagine there was lots of competition for buggy whips back a 100 years ago. and then the industry collapsed, not because there were no more competitors, but because people realized they didn't need buggy whips any more.

at some point, business executives are going to look at the equation of $150 per seat to use a huge, clunky application suite where 95% of the functionality is unused, and then say, why are we wasting stockholder's money?

ms-office may - m.a.y. learn a painful lesson and recover, and that lesson is, stop being tied to documents.

I think some people are missing the point though. Scoble is not talking about "Business Process Automation" or ERP solutions (or are you? don't want to put words in your mouth) - he's talking about the simple act of sharing, editing and revising documents for simple day-to-day use.

Office has tried this before, but it seems there is renewed energy in this direction with Office + Office Live.

Also the larger point is that while web 2.0 and other office type apps try to catch up with office 97, MS is on to Office 12 already.

As good as Web 2.0 is, the client side will and should always have a place. Microsoft is mixing the client with the server to achieve the best of both worlds. If you think you don't need the client, where would you be without your browser ;)

Just MHO

This would be wonderful news, and I'd be delighted to recommend this kind of a system, but the fact is that Microsoft has been screwing their customers in the Office space for so long that there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that corporations which see IT tools as any kind of an advantage will bite on this new kind of a hook. This is great news from another point of view, though, as high-quality web-enabled clones of this clone of the original Xerox system will surely be coming on the market in no time, and we can get this value in a way which won't have us paying through our noses for years to come with mandatory upgrades, like as with the Office suite.

What do you mean by "Office 12 pivot table feature" ? You really think that's a new feature?

Chris: You're probably right and I probably did miss Scoble's point. But Windows Workflow Foundation is about a whole lot more than the "simple act of sharing, editing, and revising documents" http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building....

simple act of sharing, editing and revising documents for simple day-to-day use

Well maybe so, but that doesn't fit the defintion of "workflow". Workflow goes well-beyond just simple groupware-collaborating slash revisional documenting, it's a process, a flowchart governed by rules or procedures, task focused.

It's just BizTalk down to the client level...

I sometimes wonder if you guys live in the same world as the rest of us... this constant mantra about web 2.0, and services, and you can do everything online and connected and whoo... well reality check - you can't. You might be able to in your little part of the world - Silicon Valley and Redmond... but I think for most of us, the Infrastructure isn't there and is still a long way off.
Office does what it says on the tin, and probably way too much besides, and if it can help with a collaborotive (where's my online spell checker when I need one ) work built in, connected to internal servers etc... then all the better - but anyone who trusts there business assets to a external web based app - is a fool!

I'm with Coulter's PS post. Anybody who tells me a multi-billion dollar application is dead was clearly hit by the idiot stick a few too many times. That goes double for not telling me it will be replaced by a similar product, but by a new kind of product. Sure, maybe eventually. But right now Office is quite safe, or to be more precise, Office-style DESKTOP applications are quite safe. The mainstream doesn't yet even understand the concept of a "web application" or a "web service" or any other buzz word we may have.

And Office being replaced in 20 years doesn't count as "I told you so" for the Gillmore types. That only works if you say "In 20 years, Office will be dead."

Let me put it this way. If I told you gasoline-powered cars are dead, not will be dead, but are dead. And I said that hydrogen cars are the new car industry. You'd tell me I'm an idiot. And that transition (to hydrogen or SOMETHING else) is already set in stone and inevitable and beginning to happen. The transition to thin client web office application whatever has yet to even begin.

I just think people should keep that in mind when they say something is dead. IMHO, these types of articles are about as valid as any Microsoft/Apple/Sony/Nintendo/Whatever is dead article.

"The Excel pivot table feature alone is worth paying hundreds of dollars. Alone."
That's the other thing. I don't *have* or *want* to pay hundreds of dollars for my office suite, much less my spreadsheet program. Dispite what some people say about OpenOffice.org or Gnome Office, they are free and they get the job done. Why should I waste my money on an expensive office suite when the free stuff already does everything I need?

You're not saying that they're making sure Windows Workflow Foundation won't run on Mono, are you?

I don't think MS will deliberately do stuff to screw Mono.

I just don't think that, as long as BallmerGates is in charge, that they'll pull their head out and officially HELP Mono either.

"I’m a card-carrying member of the Web 2.0 Working Group, but there isn’t anything as cool as OneNote coming out yet. Sorry. Not even close."

Sorry, there's been virtually zero adoption of OneNote in the corporate workflow. Stick that up your ass and smoke it.

They don't live in the same world we do, they conjure up theories that are near-certifiably crazy, their efforts on the large-scale are wholly counter-productive, they enforce a groupthink cultic mentality as the basic entrance ticket, they don't know the first thing about real IT or real ERP, they are trapped in their own little tech conference and party worlds, anything between the Bay Area and NYC is fly-over country, so why then do they get all the megaphones, jobs, perks and attention?

Sadly, I don't have an answer. Just an interesting question.

you all that think the office 12 pivot stuff isn't worth a couple hundred should go over to the office 12 excel blog. I'm buyin MSFT on Monday...

Gregg, you should have linked: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/12/15/...

sorry robert.