corigin.com

Microsoft is bipedal; its legs are Windows and Office. I’ve always thought
that Office was the more important, and less open to attack. But there
insurgents lurking out there in deep space; their attacks are just pinpricks.
So far.

Windows, at the end of the day, is not a
very good operating system. Some of the pieces of Office, though, are superb,
and would probably have been very successful over the years even without the
file-format lock-in and abusive competitive practices.
In particular, I’d put
Excel on my personal list of the five best pieces of software ever.
I want to bust the file-format logjam not because I think it’ll sweep Office
away, but competition will make Office cheaper and all the competitors
better.

I hadn’t really paid much attention to the
Google Docs thing; but then, a couple of
times in recent weeks, I was in gmail and there was a message with a .doc
attached.
Normally I’d save it and open it with MacOffice;
I have an elderly but still satisfactory version, but that’s all
screwed up because my new Mac came with a trial version of the latest release,
which I accidentally opened once and it’s bollixed up my fonts somehow.

Then I saw “Open as as a Google Document” and I tried and, you know, it’s
Good Enough. And snappy. And free. And
internationalized.
And I’m
not the only
person having this experience.

Yow… thought-provoking.

Now I see that Apple is taking a run at the fortress with
Numbers. Dunno yet whether
it’s going to be a triumph like Keynote or a stinking piece of crap like iCal,
but the fact that they’re trying is significant.

I’ll be honest, I’d thought that MS-Office on the desktop was going to be a
central feature of the ecosystem for as far forward as I could see. But maybe
not.

…more