Steve Mallet has some ideas about why Microsoft Office is becoming irrelevant. The tone sounds like a lot of chest-beating to justify blogging. Lurking in there is a more powerful idea: 30-odd years on, and communication is still the killer app for computers. We're shifting from an ecosystem where communication involved schlepping word documents around to an ecosystem where we're putting all of our information on the web (possibly with web services, possibly asynchronously).
Another way of looking at it: there was a span of time (80's and 90's) where there were two main vectors for information transfer: copying files around (WordPerfect, dBase or Excel files), and writing programs to manage information transactions (particularly client-server apps, with an overemphasis on client-side development). Now, not only are the apps simpler server-side apps, but the "documents" for those apps are simple snippets of text (possibly marked up in (HT|X)ML, possibly by hand).
Certainly an interesting way of looking at the issue.
Re:Naive Blogging
ziggy on 2002-06-02T22:42:01
My first thought was to waive off Steve's comment as yet another overhyped observation about blogs. Then it hit me that there was more to it than that.About 10 years ago, if someone wanted to roll out a corporate-wide app for timesheets, they'd probably be focusing on the various Win3.1 desktops in the company and write something that ran in a DOS window over NETWARE to talk to a dBase app. Six years ago, it would have been very similar, except it would have been Win95, VB and an Access database. Today, lots of development managers need to think long and hard about doing something that's not web-based.
The last three years or so, it's been total web-based development for this kind of project. The recent twist is that some of these apps have a web-service-y interface as well. All of this has significantly de-emphasized the role of Office products for this kind of information transaction (no more download-this-spreadsheet-and-print-it-out style of communication), the uses where they serve as a form of organizational duct tape.
None of this has to do with making Word (or LyX or Ted) outmoded for the problem it was originally intended to solve in the first place, things like writing large manuscripts.
Re:Naive Blogging
TorgoX on 2002-06-02T23:51:54
About 10 years ago, if someone wanted to roll out a corporate-wide app for timesheets, they'd probably be focusing on the various Win3.1 desktops in the company and write something that ran in a DOS window over NETWARE to talk to a dBase app. [...]Today, lots of development managers need to think long and hard about doing something that's not web-based.The difference, tho: the app from ten years ago would run faster. I used a web-based timesheet app at my last company job, and it was agonizingly slow.
Re:Naive Blogging
vsergu on 2002-06-03T00:10:29
And Word 2002 is slow compared with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS as I remember it. Are we really progressing?Re:Naive Blogging
ziggy on 2002-06-03T01:19:53
Is that even up for debate? Word ships with such standard features as (1) The Legal Pleading Wizard, (2) the Letter to Mom Wizard, and (3) the thesaurus that offends at least one race/nationality/minority group per release cycle. And Excel has a flight simulator and security holes that open your computer up to the world.Are we really progressing?Of course we're progressing. These are the selfsame features people were crying out for since the days of WordPerfect 4.6 and Lotus 1-2-3 2.0.
Re:Naive Blogging
TorgoX on 2002-06-03T04:15:04
WP5.1 also had roughly zero internationalization support. Recent MSWord verions are actually quite adept at multilingual/multiscript text.Re:Naive Blogging
ziggy on 2002-06-03T01:43:24
Three years ago, the company I was working for switched from their old DOS-and-NETWARE based timesheet program to a webbed one. You could tell who was running Linux and loathe to reboot every two weeks, because these were the same developers who were asking around to borrow a friend's computer "just for a couple of minutes" to enter timesheets.The webbed version supported both browsers (Netscape and IE on windows), and the please-upgrade-your-browser page was so broken, it didn't render the link to the click-here-if-you-think-your-browser-is-up-to-snuff page. Once we got past that little buglet, it was at least possible to do timesheets without rebooting or borrowing someone else's Windows box.
Someone needs to hack the OS widgets so that textboxes (notably as used in Web pages) have automatic spellchecking. These days, whenever I write email or a post that's not just a few lines long, I write it up in a word processor, and then paste it into the textbox once I'm finished. The reason is that the word processor has the various kinds of spellchecking and even the occasionally useful grammar checking.
Re:MSWord features
koschei on 2002-06-03T14:05:02
Isn't that supposed to be one of the nice features of OS X? A standard text entry widget that supports that sort of thing. It would certainly be nice to have on other systems. Heck, I'd be happy with the ability to plug the editor my choice in whenever something wants a textarea.
There was a browser called Webite for RISC OS --- instead of textareas it had a little button that would open up a text editor and allow you to edit the text. You'd then save and close and that would be that. Quite nice. Amusing on pages that expected a text area to be a particular size rather than just a small button.
