Steve Ballmer weighs in on the future of Office
Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop reports on Steve Ballmer's comments regarding the future of Office. Aside from the comments, it is interesting that reporters weren't allowed into the event - Todd could hear the address from the hall outside. Anyway, Ballmer said people should think about three main areas when considering the future of Office.
- Software plus service
- User interface
- "Office as a participant in line-of-business processes."
As a specialist in Office oriented development, I'm most interested in items 1 and 3. There was a time when I would have thought that these two areas didn't have much to do with each other. As time goes on, they may be increasingly related. Thinking about software plus service, you could interpret this many ways. Regardless of how you interpret it, this statement should have one implication - the Office client applications need to understand how to interact with web-based services. Right now, I think Office's ability to use web-based services other than those provided by SharePoint is pretty weak.
Where 1 and 3 converge is in the following: if Office has a place as a participant in line-of-business processes in the future and if line-of-business applications continue to migrate to web-based applications with service-oriented architectures, then the ability to interact with web-based services (and not just SharePoint) is a very important attribute.
Still, I'm not sure this stuff matters to where I see the most corporate Office development occurring today - down in the trenches of individual departments. You know - the places that people don't seem to talk about anymore. While this could be the same as "Office as a participant in line-of-business processes", there seems to be a disconnect between what Microsoft talks about and what occurs in practice. Microsoft's vision is more grandiose than reality. The risk of a grandiose strategy is that while it is great to show what is possible with the Office System, if your primary message involves complex systems requiring the whole Microsoft stack, the whole message can be lost on the requirement of the stack and the smell of a sales strategy. Hopefully OBA will find a way to embrace and promote the simpler systems that have been and should continue to be a sweet spot for Office development in addition to the large systems.