Gary Edwards's Library tagged MSOffice-ecosystem →  View Popular

Michael Hickins separates the platform forest from the application trees, putting the focus of the future where it belongs - the movement of the legacy MSOffice Productivity Environment to the Web.  The only question will be which Web?  The Open Web?  Or the MS-Web?

excerpt:  Microsoft and Apple have leveraged a particular dominant proprietary platform (Windows/Office in one case, the iPhone/iTunes duopoly in the other) to turn every other vendor into a bit player; and by allowing other vendors to sell products or services that integrate with theirs, they offer just enough incentives for the others to play along. Google is also leveraging a dominant platform (in this case, the Web, the largest platform there is) just as relentlessly as Microsoft and Apple have done, but with an open source philosophy that encourages others to compete.

The ecosystem includes everything from a development platform to application suites, but its strength emanates from a basic understanding of what it takes to dominate technology: you have to control what former Open Document Foundation director Gary Edwards calls the “point of assembly” — that crucial spot where end users have to come in order to save, share and retrieve their documents — the final work product that all this technology is meant to help create. What Google is in the process of doing is moving that point of assembly from the desktop, where Microsoft and Apple rule, to the Web, where Google is king.

industry.bnet.com/...s-ecosystem-changes-everything - Preview

Web-Productivity-Environment Open-Web MS-Web MSOffice-ecosystem Open-Web-Ecosystem Open-Web-Productivity

This commentary concerns the Microsoft Office Productivity Environment and the opportunity presented as Microsoft tries to move that environment to the MS-Web stack of servers and services. The MS-Web is comprised of many server side applications, but the center is that of the Exchange/SharePoint/MOSS juggernaut. With the 2010 series of product and services release, Microsoft will be accelerating this great transition of the Microsoft monopoly base.

While there are many Open Web alternatives to specific applications and services found in the 2010 MS-Web stack, few competitors are in position to put their arms around the whole thing. This is after all an ecosystem that has been put in transition. Replacing parts of the MSOffice ecosystem will break the continuity of existing business processes bound to that productivity environment. This is a disruption few businesses are willing to tolerate. Because of the disruptive cost and the difficulty of cracking into existing bound business systems without breaking things, Microsoft is in position to charge a premium for comparatively featureless MS-Web products and services. Given time, this will no doubt change. And because of the impossible barriers to entry, Microsoft has had lots of time.

Still, i'm betting on the Open Web. This commentary attempts to explain why......

I also had some fun with Google Docs templates. What a mess :)

sites.google.com/...productivity-point-of-assembly - Preview

msoffice-2010 MSOffice-ecosystem MSOffice-productivity

Gary Edwards's List: Compatibility matters - The lessons of Massachusetts are many. Application level "compatibility" with existing MSOffice desktops and workgroups is vital. Format level "compatibility" with the legacy of billions of binary documents is vital. And "ecosystem" compatibility with the MSOffice productivity environment.

www.diigo.com/...compatibility-matters - Preview

msoffice ooxml odf openoffice massachusetts productivity-environment bound-business-processes MSOffice-ecosystem unified-productivity compatibility interoperability