Microsoft Office on iPad

ZDNet asks how it will work.

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

Google lure users away from M$ Office with an Office plugin to socialize Word, Excel etc.

Can it be this simple?

Personally, I'm very excited by Wave. I think it's going to be great (as in Google usually make quality stuff when they put their minds to it, I think it will be free enough to use with good conscience, and it will be uber-powerful)

I'm also willing to bet on the ultra-conservatism of the majority of users, and predict that they WON'T GET IT. This will have made hardly a dent on either email or M$ Office use by this time next year. Most people will be confused (rather than delighted) by the blurring of email, document editing and real time conversation. Early adopters won't be able to use it to send emails or share documents with late-adopters, so hardly anyone will be able to use it in enterprises etc.

The people who'll be most affected by this are 37 Signals, Huddle, SocialText etc. who are trying to sell web-based project management or enterprise blogs and wikis to early adopters. It's gonna be a tsunami in that market.

Nevertheless, can't wait to play with it.

Couple of interesting posts

Microsoft Office in Silverlight?

Google + Salesforce

Currently tighter integration of Google's online office-style apps. with Salesforce's platform.

Notes how viral Google apps are spreading :

Much of this will happen under-the-radar. David Armstrong, product and marketing manager for Google Enterprise in EMEA, told me yesterday that Google Apps already has half a million organizations — not individuals, organizations — signed up worldwide, with 2000 more signing up every day. But that astounding adoption rate is visible only to Google. There are no shrinkwrap packages passing through distributors’ warehouses or flying off retailers’ shelves. There’s not even any money changing hands for sign-ups to the free version. It’s just an invisible stream of bits in the ether. Adoption will be mostly unseen, until one day it will suddenly have become too big to ignore.

Meanwhile ZDnet bloggers are tracking the fast evolving cloud / platform-as-service war.

Details of the OOXML standards meeting.

Simon Wardley recently linked this document about standards and a possible attempt by Microsoft to create a new internet-wide document standard. Think Office as the client to a proprietory M$ web.

Interesting that they might still be trying to play this game. Does it become easier if everyone assumes they've given up?