Office Exit
November 18th, 2008
Just sitting here today banging away at all of these desktop ‘productivity’ applications on my laptop and thinking about how great it would be to have tools that are fundamentally different than what we have been using for lo these 20 years. I am rooting for new market solutions that can release me from these separate applications for ‘writing’, ‘calculating’, ‘emailing’, ‘collaborating’ and ‘presenting’. As Google, Zoho and others introduce new web-based office applications in the cloud they will solve the issue of local thick client installs of office software. But, here’s hoping they, or some of our open source friends include fundamental changes in the nature of how these tools behave and inter operate, or at least have a plan to get there soon!
A small example - why should I have to switch out of my email presentation window to look for a map to an address presented within the message? We did a review of alternate email solutions 2 years ago, and though we did not select Zimbra at the time, they were the ‘usability’ winners as they had designed their mail interface to auto-associate data to applications such that you could complete all activity related to a message without leaving the message window. So when you hover over an address, Zimbra presented you the map automatically. If you hover over a phone number, it could be called - if over a PO number, it could be presented - the possibilities for ‘learning’ to associate data to applets was endless.
In the quest for a better mouse trap for office applications, please be sure we improve the bait…please?
November 20th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
You should have gone with Zimbra, only because they named the company after a Talking Heads song.