When I first tried out Google apps I was aghast at the user experience. Basic editing was clunky, long-established platform GUI standards were violated, you couldn’t directly drag or paste images, and more. Interactivity had been set back ten years compared with the slick, quick UI’s of the modern era.
But increasingly I found myself depending on these tools. Why? Because of the new paradigm of collaboration that they enable. No longer must you sit in a cave and perfect a document before tossing over the wall. In the new era, you don’t have to wait for a document to be finished to get feedback on it; multiple people can collaborate on it simultaneously, and everyone always has the latest version at all times. It’s a better way to work.
But we are still stuck with that clunky browser-based user experience, that is now 12 years old and not much better than it was two years ago. It’s usable, yes, but let’s be clear: Google Spreadsheets cannot hold a candle to Excel in the tightness of the user experience.
So when Microsoft announced over a year ago that it was going to match Google Apps I thought, that’s kind of nice. The documents will be accessible from any web browser, and Google could use some competition.
But why are they racing to give up their evolved user experience? It really is a pain to use web apps within a web browser; there are countless little user experience compromises that we must still live with. Why must we have either cloud-hosted documents or a modern user experience?
After all, it’s not the web browser that makes web apps special. It’s the fact that the apps and data are available everywhere and are shared in real time.
Vision to steal: Why doesn’t Microsoft let you browse, open and edit cloud-stored documents directly from within Office apps? Users would have the best of both worlds: ubiquitous access (even from a web browser when needed), continuous publishing, and the most comfortable and responsive UI.
If you and I are co-editing a document, we’d see each others edits in Word or Excel or PowerPoint in real time (as in Google Wave). This is not just a parlor trick; it’s a fantastic way to work collaboratively over distance while on speakerphone. (We can expect to see much more of this.)
As a bonus idea to steal, cloud-hosted documents can be kept in sync with local copies (which is what Google Gears does). Opening a desktop .DOC or .XLS that you have shared on the cloud would keep all edits synched to both places whenever possible. The user could do offline editing and have the changes propagated when their Internet access is restored.
If the competition is zigging, you should be zagging, because by the time you catch up to where the competition is today, they will be somewhere else. Don’t make it easy for customers to continue to pick the leader. Add some enticing benefits that catch the customer’s attention and make them make a choice. Then, over time, fill in the parts where you are behind.
Microsoft was certainly considering this when I was there. On the Mac team, we were impressed with SubEthaEdit, at the time the coolest of the real-time collaboration products. But ultimately the problem is that it would require a massive re-write of the basic code.
The code architecture was designed in an era of a single user at a workstation. The entire guts of all the original Office programs are built around this assumption. According to the Dev managers, it wasn’t as simple as slapping a network layer on top of the “edit document” calls.
Of course that begs the question of why Microsoft doesn’t do this. They have the resources to throw an entire team at a new, networked version of Office that is built from scratch for the new wired world. In fact Microsoft did this back in the “internet tidal wave” days with the NetDocs team (too far ahead of their time, apparently).
From my now-outsider status, it seems that Microsoft has submitted to the error of focusing on the competition rather than the customer. They are trying to build web products that match the features of Google’s products, with a minor twist here or there (search, now featuring a logo with horrible typography!).
I’m reminded of this quote from the book “Good to Great”, which I think sums it up nicely. “If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you’d be struck by the utter absence of talk about “competitive strategy.” Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.”
Thanks, David,
Your comment reminds me of this:
http://stealthisidea.com/articles/chase-customers/