In the months since August 2009, interested users submitted ideas to makeofficebetter.com
The Microsoft employees who ran that site have shut it down. Not stopped accepting new submissions, but shut it down entirely.
As a result, all the community submitted data is lost to the community. Or has been taken from us, since it is no longer shared.
People have been asking me why Google bought Docverse.
Surely, Google already has the collaboration smarts? After all, it was Google Docs which made document collaboration mainstream. And it is Google Wave which is arguably now taking it to the next level. Google also employs Neil Fraser, and it recently bought Etherpad.
So what does Docverse give them? And why pay so much?
Its not about getting the people – Docverse is a small team – although additional engineers with domain knowledge are surely nice to have.
What this is about is taking away the reasons for upgrading to Office 2010, and more particularly, Sharepoint 2010. Any business which takes Sharepoint 2010 is making a commitment to Microsoft technology for the next decade or so, which effectively shuts Google enterprise products out, and might even lead these customers to use IIS etc for their consumer web sites (which would also be bad for Google).
So Google is doing what it can to give businesses reason to stop and think.
In the 6 months ended 31 December 2009, Microsoft’s Business Products Division had revenue of $9.149 billion, and operating income of $5.867 billion. Office is responsible for around 90% of that.
What would it be worth to Google, if it could put a 5% dent in those figures? 5% of $9 billion is $450 million. 0.5% is $45 million.
Put one way, if the people responsible for just 0.5% of Office purchase decisions look at Google + Docverse and say “hey, we can stick with the version of Office we’ve got; we don’t need to buy Office 2010 and Sharepoint to do real time collaboration”, then the Docverse acquisition has made sense for Google.
But really, its about the larger ecosystems, not just the Office purchase. An Office purchase is a commitment to Windows on the client, and possibly Windows on the server. And it has network effects along the supply chain (people you exchange documents with). So preventing an Office purchase frees up a lot of other spend.
Now, Google needs to prove that with Google you get:
Docverse gives Google slick looking Add-Ins for Word, Powerpoint and Excel.
Time is of the essence. Office 2010 will be launched for businesses on May 12, and available online/retail in June.
The adds-ins are worth a few months head start. (So maybe it is about the people after all?)
Now Google needs to integrate Docverse in to Google Apps. Rip/replace of the existing Docverse back-end (and probably much of their Word Add-In, since it sends the whole document every time you save, not just the diffs – something Plutext has had right since the beginning) will take a while. However, the rip/replace isn’t necessary for a rudimentary integration into Google Docs. What is critical is to make Docverse’s server-side differencing work on Google scale and interoperate with the Google Docs webapp. Same for presentations and slides.
It’ll be interesting to see how quickly this can be done.
Plutext has released a robot for Google Wave which you can use to convert Microsoft Office Word documents into Wave content.
The robot is at docxwave@appspot.com
This is especially useful if your Word document contains tables or images, because copy/pasting from Word leaves them out. Adding the document as an attachment in Wave wouldn’t be the answer either, because that doesn’t bring the power of Wave to bear on the doc at all.
This wave was the announcement and is for support (Wave account required):
By now you’ve probably heard how hitherto largely unknown i4i teamed up with some bottom feeding lowlife and successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement to the tune of USD 240 million.
If you read the patent in question, US patent number 5787449, you’ll see that the so-called invention was entirely obvious, consisting only of annotations pointing to positions in a character stream (as distinct from embedded within it).
Microsoft suggested some prior art, but nothing which knocked out the patent.
What i4i chose to call a ‘metacode’ sounds a lot like the markers described in 1986 in Data Structures in the Andrew Text Editor:
A marker is a data structure that refers to a portion of the text of a document; the portion starting at some character and extending for some length.
The people involved in the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines leading up to publication of their proposal 3 in 1994 (which is before the patent was filed) probably discussed and published relevant stuff as well – did anyone ask them? [Edit 18/9/09] Hmmm, Markup Reconsidered (presented in 1992) says:
A word should be said about so-called out-of-line markup, non-embedded structure that conforms to the syntactic requirements of a given markup standard
and references a 1992 document: David Barnard, Lou Burnard, Jean-Pierre Gaspart, Lynne Price, C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, and Nino Varile, “Notes on SGML Solutions to Markup Problems”, TEI MLW18, which I haven’t looked at. And “Refining our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies” contains a wealth of historical references which probably contain stuff.
[Added 18/9/09] Most interestingly, Ted Nelson states in “Embedded Markup Considered Harmful” that Xanadu has used parallel markup since the 1960’s! Unfortunately, he didn’t publish much about it (which limits its value as prior art); though Rick points out that Nelson disclosed some stuff in his 1992 book.
So the i4i patent should have been knocked out:
In any case, the patent system should be reformed, so that, if you must have a patent system at all, and one in which software and algorithms are effectively patentable, such patents last for no more than say 4 years from the priority date. Their patent would have expired in 1998 (the same year it was granted!).
In this case, what i4i patented has been independently thought of (ie invented) as part of one approach to the related problem of overlapping markup. Independent invention should also be a defense (although that might not have helped Microsoft in this case)
A further thought: what if patentees were liable every time they described something as new if it could be shown that it wasn’t? That might give them pause for thought.
We’ve just published a new build of the Word Add-In, which among other things, supports replication between users of images and comments.
For a good while now, with Plutext you’ve been able to be in a Word document at the same time as your co-workers – provided all you were doing was working on tables and paragraphs (editing them, inserting, deleting or moving them around).
With this latest release, you can add images and Word comments, and have them replicate properly between Word 2007 users.
Here is a screencast of this in action:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
If you want to play with this yourself, you can download our Word Add-In and give it a shot!
For username & password, please see here. The password is “tester”.
For detailed instructions, see this PDF, or this earlier screencast.
If you’d like to chat about your own Plutext installation, please contact us using this form.
It’s Monday morning on October 27th as I write here in Australia.
Steve Balmer gave hints in 2 separate reports at the beginning of the month that they’ll be announcing their in-Office collaboration stuff this week.
The first report was in www.cio.co.uk
Ballmer:So we are embracing Software + Services, Cloud Computing as hard as anybody. By the time we finish our Professional Developers Conference this month, I think you’ll have to say that there is nobody out there with as wide a range of Cloud Computing services as Microsoft, including, dare I say it, Google …
CIO: Steve, I guess the $64,000 question from a lot of people’s point of view is, is there going to be an Office for the Web, something that really competes head on with Google Docs, Google Apps?
Ballmer: .. I think what people want is something as rich as Microsoft Office, something that you can ‘click and run’, if you are not at your own desk. Something that is compatible, document-wise with Microsoft Office and something that offers the kind of joint editing capabilities that is nice in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Will Microsoft Office offer that? Yes! Standby for details in the next month.
CIO: So, in the backend of Microsoft R&D, are there people beavering away at versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc, that are purely web based? Or, is it always going to be this hybrid?
Ballmer: What does it mean to be purely Web based? Do we want them to be as only as powerful as ‘runs in a browser’? No. We want software that is more powerful than runs in a browser. Does that mean we will not have some neat stuff that does run in the browser? No.
We think you’ll actually want the full power of Word, Excel and PowerPoint – and you’ll want to be able to get that simply. But, if you just happen to be in an Internet cafe kiosk and you want to do some light editing, perhaps we need to have a way to support you in that as well, inside the browser. ..
In another, in response to a question about Office Live, he said:
“Office Live has a few things left it needs to do. Number one, and probably most important, is to make sure that people using Office have greater ability to collaborate with one another. We have some of that today with [Office Live] Workspaces, as well as that we’ve got SharePoint; we can do more and some of those things will be better than the other alternatives.
Number two, is when we do Office Live, it has to be true to Office; you’ll need to be able to have full Office documents and programs and share them.
Number three, we have to make it so that – most people use Office most of the time from a single machine. But if you’re away from your desk, at a cafe, a kiosk or your school library, and you don’t have Office, you’ll want to be able to do something quickly; we have to make sure you can get it easily, stream it down, put it in a browser, something like that there… details coming in a few weeks.
I’m not going to write here what I think they are likely to announce. More sensible to wait a little longer. It will be interesting though to see what is available immediately, and how much is just vaporware.
I like programming in Java. It is still a great way to write cross-platform code. I’ve bet my business on it.
But sometimes, Sun is just too slow to fix bugs (or make the fixes available). And this is still their role, even when a user has a fix to contribute.
Take the following 2 which have bitten me this week:
Fixes haven’t become available for either of these yet on Java 6 (though the first has been closed here and here)
Sun really needs to invest more in Java, to get all the outstanding bugs fixed, and the fixes out quickly. (Yes, people who write and use open source expect fixes more quickly than most vendors can deliver them. Life is much quicker in the open source world)
But as we know, Sun doesn’t make much money from it – directly at least. And even though Sun is quite clear in their strategy to use Java to drive sales of their hardware, this lack of revenue shows – shows up as a lack of support.
So what about a logo people using Java can put on their websites, which communicates “I bought some Sun hardware to support Sun’s investment in Java” to other people who use Java. This may make them consider buying some Sun gear as well, and proliferation of the logo would remind Sun that Java really is what butters their bread.
Maybe that needs to be “to support Sun’s investment in Java on Linux” (or even on Linux x86_64) – since its not Windows that these bugs occur on.
Or how about a way for Sun to earn credits towards a Sun hardware purchase: “If Sun fixes this bug, it will earn them a notional half a purchase”. Fix this one as well, and I’ll buy something. A great little site for someone to write.
Yes, I know you can vote for a bug (the printing bug has 45 votes since 26 November 2007 – that’s a lot of votes, comparatively speaking – but still there is no indication of when a fix will be available).
But Sun is wildly optimistic in only giving people three votes, no matter how many bugs are causing them grief.
I’ve bought 3 servers, 2 workstations, and a laptop in the last 6 months or so, and none of these are from Sun. But I would change my purchasing policies for some tangible indication that result in quicker bug fixes. So my third idea in this little brainstorm – what about allocating special higher priority bug votes when people buy Sun gear?
Well, there were a few interesting announcements from Microsoft last week, but they didn’t include OaaS (Office as a Service), nor improved collaboration.
The three announcements:
Office Live Workspace doesn’t have real collaboration, yet. As ReadWriteWeb puts it:
Although Office Live Workspace allows for collaboration, it’s not real-time, online collaboration. Instead, if one user is editing a file, another will be informed the file is “checked out.” When they finish editing and save their changes the document is checked back in for other users to access.
The situation is similar in Sharepoint. As Bill Gates put it:
I have a Word document that if I open it up, you can see that I’ve been force [sic] versioning, check in/check out on my documents, so I could check out the document, make a change, and then come down and save those changes
Mr Gates explained that between these 2 products Microsoft intends to cover the whole market:
We want to scale [Sharepoint] all the way down, so that literally you don’t have to have an IT capability, and that’s where we get into what we’ve branded Live. So we’re working that one up through small customers. We want to work [Sharepoint] down and make sure there’s no gap in-between.
When Microsoft eventually gets around to offering real collaboration, there is no reason for either of those 2 products to do it differently (unless they wish to upsell people to Sharepoint). So its more a question of which one gets real collaboration first; Sharepoint customers are probably more deserving, but Office Live Workspace customers might make good guinea pigs.
“Microsoft Office Live Workspace is being offered free of charge. .. The company expects to release the final public version of Office Live Workspace later in the year.”
That’s not to say that real collaboration will necessarily be free, though it might be.
For hosted Sharepoint (Microsoft Online Services), the licensing model:
New customers and customers without Microsoft Software Assurance can purchase Microsoft Online Services as a per-user subscription. Existing customers with Software Assurance on their Microsoft Client Access Licenses can purchase a user subscription at a discount, enabling them to maximize their existing Microsoft software investments. Customers with a subscription have rights to both Microsoft Online Services and to access on-premises server software, giving them the ability to blend Web-based services with on-premises software.
So when will the collaboration offering happen?
Venture Beat says that “with Microsoft still raking in so much money from traditional software, [full-on war with Google Apps is] still at least a couple years away”. Mary Jo tells us Microsoft will fill in the blanks around its Live services strategy at its Professional Developers Conference in October.
Which brings me to the Silverlight 2 beta. I’m inclined to think Microsoft will offer real collaboration as soon as they’ve got a suitable client (ie not before Silverlight 2 has been through its beta cycle). The TextGlow docx viewer sets high expectations as to how this might perform.
It looks like most (hopefully even all) of the weird behaviour I have been experiencing with Alfresco’s JCR API disappear if I explicitly wrap the actions performed in each session in a transaction using getRetryingTransactionHelper().
According to Alfresco’s wiki, an implicit transaction should take care of this for you. Well, some 4 days of pain tells me it doesn’t!
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