Tuesday, July 9, 2002

Building a better Microsoft Office #

I just listened to a very interesting interview on what would make for a superior Microsoft Office.  Dave Coursey, the host, solicited feedback.  Here's the email I sent him: I enjoyed your interview http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2835517,00.html# on MS Office.  You said that you'd be interested in listener's thoughts on the future of Office and what would make it compelling to me. Let me sketch out what would knock my socks off.  I want icrosoft to actually implement their "universal canvas"   From Jon Udell (http://udell.roninhouse.com/GroupwareReport.html#191): Microsoft coined the term "universal canvas" when it announced its next-generation platform, .NET. The term connotes a single viewing and editing surface on which heterogenous datatypes fluidly interact. These datatypes are supported by a range of specialized services for text, equations, and illustrations. But, since everything shares a common XML representation, there are also common services for search and annotation. You talked about this idea when you mentioned how it would be great to have a blank document that would integrate all the different datatypes and tools on that canvas as needed. Better XML/HTML editing would be a start -- but the universal canvas (which handles all types of XML formats) would be a *killer application*. Moreover, I would absolutely love it -- my data would not be locked in to MS Word -- but MS would get customers if it could deliver on a program that lets me create what I want to create w/o locking in my data. One more idea.  MS Office should become a full-blown platform for web-services.  There's the rhetoric of good web services support in Office XP (http://www.microsoft.com/office/developer/webservices/default.asp) but I get the sense that it's not that great so far. (http://www.google.com/apis/api_faq.html#tech25). A universal canvas that is hooked up to be able to consume (and produce?) web services would be an amazing application for writing and creating and reading documents for the future of the web. -Raymond Yee   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/9/02; 4:17:51 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss