I am finally getting around to catching up on my feed-reading and came across an interesting article about the creator of HotMail, Sabeer Bhatia and his latest creation, Live Documents. After reading a couple of articles on this and checking out the screenshots I think that Mr. Bhatia and team might be on to something. An online Office Suite that looks and feels like Office. As the boys from Guinness say, Brilliant! I doubt the boys in legal at Microsoft will feel the same way. We’ll have to wait and see. I went ahead and signed up for it though.

I also have been reading rumblings that Google might be looking to buy Salesforce.com. If Google were to do that and integrate Salesforce with tools like Gmail and Google Spreadsheets, that would be a game changer at the desktop levels in corporations. Salesforce.com is already a dominator in their space. As someone that had to use it for a long time, it was a good tool for tracking sales opportunities and managing pipeline, but fell quite short with integrating with Outlook and Office. The Outlook integration was via some software that they wrote that you had to load on the PC that then created new buttons in Outlook for Salesforce integration. This software was bloated and never worked all that well for me.

Dear Google,

Buy Salesforce.com. Use a fraction of the brainpower that you have inhabiting that Google World in sunny California to figure out the integration. Spend a few of those $975,345,123,734,956,745 you have on a tiny bit of marketing on this and welcome to the world of the corporate desktop in a very real way.

If you want to compensate me for my guidance, please email me and I would be happy to send you a routing number.

Yours truly,

Dave 

Both of these pieces of news lead me to one conclusion. The war for the desktop that was once over, with Microsoft winning, might turn into World Desktop War II and this time the outcome might not be as rosey for the boys and girls in Redmond. I personally enjoy using Microsoft’s products most of the time. What I enjoy more is stiff competition that leads to a better product and experience for me, the user, who will inevitably decide who will win this war.

I’ll end with a letter to Microsoft:

Dear Microsoft,

Please change the way you work. Your business has turned in to an annuity. An annuity business that is becoming harder and harder defend every three years when your customer base is up for renewal of their purchases from you. Some say that you have worked diligently to own the server room data center. I would agree. Where your risk is at this point is the desktop and more importantly the people that use the stuff on their desktops. You have to embrace the web in a bigger way. Live.com is not it. SharePoint, while a good platform, is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about the nuts and bolts to every user’s day; their line of business applications, their email applications, their office applications, etc. There are very smart people that are creating tools that are/do the following:

• easy to use
• they work
• platform independent
• always available from anywhere

You should too!

I recognize that my points are simple minded, but that is on purpose. This is a simple problem. Users have simple needs. Solve them first. Stop worrying about adding 10,000 new features to every product and worry about making what you have better, more available, and easier to use. As someone that is now in their mid-30s and grew up using your products, I have a natural inclination to them, but that is waning. Most people use your products because they are the “corporate standard”. You should do something about your products, or they just might not be the “corporate standard” for too long. You have good, smart people there. Get all the obstacles out of their way and let them work freely to create really, really great products again.

With love and affection,

Dave