Dan Bricklin on Surface Pro

Dan Brickin comments  that Microsoft Surface Pro is really an Excel machine.

I think that's a good way of thinking. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that Microsoft ought to be releasing an "Excel Appliance". Much as Google's ChromeBooks are basically browser appliances, Microsoft could have released an "Office Appliance" that booted straight into Office, ignoring the rest of the paraphernalia of an OS and storing / sharing documents in the cloud. It could have created an app-store of Excel plugins. Included Skype and email as part of the mix.

I'd have called it "Surface Excel" and buried the toxic W****** brand for once and for all.

Mobile Office Wars

It's on.

I guess M$ missed the boat on Excel.

What Is Google+ Really About?

Vincent Wong's presentation is entertaining and plausibly right.

tl;dr : Applications socialised

Finally Microsoft does something exciting. Buys Skype.

You know, I really thought it was going to be Facebook that bought Skype. Perhaps they couldn't afford it.

Anyway, this is really the first good big move Microsoft have made on the internet since buying Hotmail. Cringley thinks it's purely defensive. And it might be, but he makes a good case that even that's a good (or necessary) idea.

But it could be so much more. If M$ don't fuck it up.

Here are a couple of observations :

1) Skype is a great brand.

I always thought that M$ had a good brand in Hotmail, but they proceeded to throw it away, continually trying to turn it into MSN / Windows / Live blah whatever. People still call it Hotmail. They still use that in the address, but M$ did everything they could to confuse and destroy the "Hot" brand.

It will be ULTRA idiotic of them to try to rename Skype as LivePhone or MSN Talk or something. I mean, really, really, really, really dumb.

Contrariwise, Skype is much better brand than anything else M$ has when it comes to cool contemporary internet stuff. Other technologies that M$ are developing could well be moved under the Skype name. For example ...

2) Skype is a social network.

It really is.

Like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And unlike either Google, Apple or any of Microsoft's previous efforts, Skype is a pretty meaningful "social graph" which can be used for all kinds of interesting experiments in social communication.

At the moment, Skype is very much focussed on synchronous chat / phone call. But it would not be hard at all to add asynchronous capabilities to the client. Some kind of pub-sub, status, wall. Allow Skype users to tag their contacts, or group them into themed lists. And then to watch the posts from a particular list. Let them add photos, links, video. I think within 6 - 8 months M$ could build a fairly plausible and compelling rival to Twitter. Especially if they allowed groups to create private workspaces and channels.

In fact, if I ran Microsoft (here it comes ...) here's exactly what I'd do. Find two or three great programmers and UX designers who are hungry to do something new. Pay Dave Winer to go and talk to them about instant outlining. Pay someone from Google's Wave project to go and talk to them about what they hoped for from it, and what went wrong. Get the designers to mock up some forward looking ideas about how a future Skype client could incorporate asynchronous communication, "narrating your work", private tweet streams, etc.

3) Skype is collaborative work

"Skype" is what people in business say when they mean "conference call".

And Skype could be another chance for M$ to get into collaborative work. Word and Excel need to support shared editing of documents. And it needs to be easy to understand. So bundle the Skype client into Office. (Not exclusively, of course). And have a menu option on Word and Excel saying "Share this document via Skype" which immediately allows you to invite skype contacts to work on a document together.

What if they don't have Office? Well, the Skype client should at least have the free document viewer built into it so that they can follow what you're doing. (I'd go further, why not allow some restricted editing facilities? And yes, this should run everywhere the Skype client runs, ie. Mac, Linux, iOS etc.)

More importantly, hello? App Stores! Have a one click "buy and install Office" built into the Windows Skype client. Make it all work smoothly.

4) Skype is a subscription service

On the subject of one-click buying, remember that Skype is a paid relationship / service. (And likely they already have the user's credit-card number.)

Apple had one of those with iTunes, and look how that worked out for them. Amazon has one, and it's managed to take the Amazon account from selling books to selling virtual servers on AWS. And it's why Amazon are a serious contender to rival Google's App Store for Android. Being able to take people's money easily is an amazingly valuable asset that none of the other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have. Even Google are struggling with this problem.

Get creative here!

5) Skype and Windows Phone

Yes, build Skype into Windows Phone. But I'd go further.

I'd immediately offer a discount on Windows Phone contracts to anyone who's put money into a SkypeOut account. It's a way of paying people to use WP7 that a) might actually encourage some undecideds but b) importantly, doesn't look (too) desperate - it is, after all, a reward for buying into the whole M$ ecosystem. Go further, a single plan for renting a Windows Phone AND SkypeOut calls.

6) More brand extension

SkypePad : it just sounds a hell of a lot funkier than Windows 8 Tablet Edition doesn't it?

Skype 360 : better than RoundTable? (Don't even start me on "Unified Communications"!)

You get the idea ...

ZDNet : 2011 is the year of the enterprise iPad.

To repeat what I've been saying for a while, Microsoft are utterly fucked if they don't get Excel on the iPad now! They will lose their best and most valuable business brand. And more importantly they'll lose their de facto ownership of the majority of the world's "semi-structured" data.

And once this is lost, the rest of the Office house of cards will come tumbling down too - I "need" Excel because all my business data is in XLS files; but once my business data isn't in XLS files (once its in iPad todo-lists and executive dashboards) then I won't need Excel; and if I don't need Excel, what else in Office do I really care about?

This is important. iPads getting into the Enterprise.

iPads are an ideal vehicle for "corporate dashboards". Expect to see every senior(ish) manager want to control their own little empire from one.

It will be very problematic for Microsoft if the iPad becomes the aspirational machine for executives. Here's why : Excel. If M$ don't get Excel onto the iPad, soon, then the iPad will pull people away from Excel. (Rather than Excel keeping people on Windows.)

Suddenly, as well as those dynamic dashboards, executive summaries, quick to-do lists and project plans will all be migrating to whatever catches the imagination of iPad users.

And if M$ lose Excel, then the whole Office edifice starts to collapse.

Over on SmartDisorganized I've been tracking and playing with spreadsheets, particularly the online variety. I'm becoming increasingly impressed by the potential of online spreadsheets as containers for mashups and widgets. In particular EditGrid which comes with embeddable queries to Amazon and Ebay "out of the box" seems to be pointing in a very interesting direction.

Whereas the online equivalents of Word or PowerPoint are more or less dead-ends, as I've said before spreadsheets (in particular Excel) are grossly underexploited powertools, not to mention the repositories of most of the world's semi-structured data.

I've also said that Excel is so good that this is all Microsoft's market to lose if they screw up the transition to a new kind of spreadsheet : the spreadsheet as front-end / dashboard to all the enterprise's information streams. A flexible mashup builder which can be configured by a reasonably smart / well trained user or the IT department or an integrator.

We are a hairsbreadth away from the socialized spreadsheet fulfilling this destiny. But I'm waiting to see who's going to give it to us. Will Microsoft succeed in reinventing Excel? Will Google pump up the capabilities of their spreadsheet to compete? Will an outsider with a technically superior web-native sheet (like EditGrid) manage to sneak in-front of both?

ZDNet bloggers on Excel's dominance.

Zoho's spreadsheet gets pivot-tables and macros.

Tim O'Reilly compares iPhone vs. Blackberry to Excel vs. Lotus 123

James Governor gets stuff.

Hmmmm ... M&A becomes about merging and pruning social graphs?

Nick Carr has a good follow up ... noting the importance of Excel

It's all vibing off everything Sig says.

I wonder if anyone remembers John Seely Brown going round a couple of years ago saying social software was for "exception handling" in the enterprise?

Final thought ... enterprise software will be "sexy" when it can do graphs like GapMinder.

Joel on Excel VBA and on how MS losing it's "backward compatibility" religion is totally screwing itself.

Paul Graham thinks Microsoft is Dead. Dave Winer disagrees. Sort of.

The caveats don't matter. Graham's greater point is compelling. Microsoft don't really seem to be making it as an Internet Playa. They've neither come up with any really compelling or exciting software on the web-as-a-platform in the last seven years nor have they bought any of the interesting new web 2.0 companies. In fact, the last interesting thing MS did was buy Hotmail which was about 10 years ago.

10 years??? !!!!

...

!!!!!!

In the meantime, it more or less looks like they've bet everything on Vista and lost, big time. The desktop operating system is a commodity. There's no (and will be no) interesting software that really needs Vista. Web served applications can run as easily on Unix. Office and Photoshop will run as easily on Macintosh. And browser-based software will run anywhere.

Microsoft may still have platforms that matter - though it's not easy to imagine where : ASP.NET essential to web-based apps? XBox beating Wii or PS3? Ray Ozzie, their great hope, seems to be missing in action, last seen a year ago speculating about his clipboard while Yahoo has Pipes up and running.

Graham's suggestions for restoring Microsoft's relevance aren't nearly as interesting as mine.

Now, of course, the funny thing is in my day job I use nothing but Microsoft software. I basically live in Windows and (and this may reflect my new status as a project managery kind of guy) Excel.

In fact, this is something I'm trying to think about more. Excel is a truly great piece of software; it's Microsoft's masterpiece. Word is an OK Word Processor. Access is A.N.Other database. Powerpoint is ... well frankly let's not go there.

But Excel is wonderful. It's the universal, "Swiss Army" desktop solution with dozens of little functional "blades". Want a "to-do" list? Excel. Want a status report? Excel? Want to do some calculations? Excel. Want to do some basic string processing? I write VBA macros for the same kinds of simple data crunching that I'd use Perl for in Unix. Want to make a couple of graphs and charts? Excel. Want to mock up some forms? Want to make tables of data and sort and filter them? You guessed it ...

And not only does Excel does all this, it makes it all pretty intuitive. Have a look at how they do Pivot Tables for an example of something pretty slick.

No-one else is even close. Not Google's online spreadsheet. Not Open Office's attempts at catching up. Not WikiCalc. Microsoft's advantage with Excel is undisputed. It's all theirs to throw away.

And what sucks most about Excel? The fact that people are always mailing spreadsheets around to each other and they have trouble keeping a single, up-to-date copy between them. What they need is Excel socialized. And where's socialized Excel? Caught up in turf-wars and lost behind a bunch of vague, confusing products like "SharePoint" and technologies like Excel Services.

Now, if I ran Microsoft, and I was worried about Microsoft being dead, I'd be making the most I could of Excel : pumping money and smart people and advertising into it, setting up skunk-works, hiring clever explainers to get simple messages out, as loudly and clearly as possible.

In particular I'd have :

• Excel Studio : a complete development environment for people to build new applications on top of the Excel engine or to compile spreadsheet-based prototypes into other pieces of software.


• A Social Excel : the Excel client would allow many people to work on a shared spreadsheet either via a central web-server, LAN server, or simply sync. multiple users together over P2P (imagine something like a Skype call working on one spreadsheet.)


• Excel Live : a free, central web-based server to set up groups sharing the same spreadsheet with (obviously) Wiki-like (WikiCalc-like) hyper-linking between spreadsheets


• Excel Express : a completely free-as-in-beer cut-down version of Excel that anyone could download and use to work on a shared spreadsheet. I'd want Excel Express to be as easily available and viral as Skype or Pando.

99% of the world's "semi-structured" data is not in Microformats but in tables in spreadsheets. And, Microsoft pretty much own that. But there's a huge demand (and opportunity) to put it all on the internet. Like I say, this is Microsoft's platform to lose.