Microsoft's Real Control Point

I was just reviewing a CNET article written in mid-July following Google’s Chrome announcement. Chrome as you may recall is Google’s new open source operating system. Having been down that road with Sun Microsystems and the Java Desktop System I rolled my eyes. Having also had an outsiders inside view of Microsoft over the years both as a competitive analyst and later as the marketing lead of an interoperability alliance with Microsoft I have seen much of the Redmond stack as threatening to a competitive landscape and the open source community. However I’ve dramatically changed my tune on much of what I think matters.

Over the years we’ve heard of many technologies labeled as architectural control points: operating system, browser (oh how wrong we were there), directory (think user authentication / password access), exchange (control email access) and lately cell phone ecosystem. Each one of these technologies held our attention for a while until something else came along proving the weakness in that as a control point. In many ways you can suggest that all of these technologies in aggregate controlled architectural flexibility and capability. But making that argument would be ridiculous as it remains true with any homogeneous system. The best news to come from Open Source is that there is a focused and strong developer base focused on creating competitive alternatives. Some are better than the proprietary, some are not. As the iPhone has proven, make something that people want to buy and their purchasing power alone is enough to move entire industries and markets. (Imagine the boring world of cell phones if Apple hadn’t pushed the capabilities and expectations for cell phones. It’s quite possible that RIM would still be selling B&W models of the popular Blackberry.)

However undisturbed is one Microsoft control point that we all take entirely for granted: the ubiquitous Office Suite. Having suffered with and been a proponent of OpenOffice I know that there are alternatives actively used by all sizes of organizations. However almost all of us use all or parts of Microsoft Office whether at home or at work. It is my contention as we view the increasingly web-based movement of applications that Office productivity tools will remain mostly on premise and will increasingly integrate cloud service capabilities and services to make application access, integration and synthesis more capable.

The biggest problem no one has solved is how to integrate multiple web services and SaaS applications for reporting, analysis and business intelligence. I recently ran across a company called Pervasive that has a solution to provide across cloud service integration. It appears to be complicated and expensive as a solution goes. But it clearly is targeting an end user need that will only further become exacerbated as more of our lives migrate online. For consumers think about how much of a pain it is to work in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. Now think how difficult it would be if you had to gather, analyze and report on data from each service regularly. For the enterprise it’s even worse. Salesforce.com, the leading online CRM tool, provides average sales reporting capabilities. Imagine how difficult it would be for someone using SAP ERP, Eloqua marketing/lead management and Google Analytics to create a cross service report for weekly review?! As someone who did weekly reporting across Google, Marketbright, Salesforce.com, Netsuite and Intuit I can tell you that this isn’t just a pain, it’s extraordinarily time consuming as well. I managed this for a company of 50. Imagine doing this for a company of 500 or 5,000!

Now to wrap this back to Office: Office remains a set of tools that we all know and we all have a local license to use. We all know how to use Excel and Powerpoint. We know how to create tags, worksheets and pie charts. Wouldn’t it be great to simply plug in web service content and have it integrate automatically in the spreadsheet we normally use for analysis and reporting? Wouldn’t it be great if that tag were dynamic and could automatically refresh as the web service is updated? Wouldn’t it be even better if we could update sales data in Excel and have that automatically updated in Salesforce? How easy and powerful would Office become then? I wonder if anyone at Microsoft has thought about how powerful Office could become?