There Was That Whole Internet Thing, Too
But more
important than any of this, was the Internet. Back then Office was the first
software I'd install on a computer, and a computer without Office wasn't fully a
computer.
(...) Suddenly computers weren't entirely about Office, they were now
about Office and the Internet.
I was working for a large
multinational in the 1990s who were big fans of everything Microsoft. At the
time Microsoft had given up on resisting the Internet, but were still fighting
to keep Internet technologies out of internal corporate networks ("Intranets").
Microsoft had a system for Intranets which was based around Microsoft
Office. Instead of linked HTML "documents", it used linked Microsoft Office
documents. You used Microsoft Word as the "browser" and used to to navigate from
document to document. I can't recall what Microsoft called the product, but it
was absolutely horrible.
At the time it sounded like a
plausible idea. After all, "everyone" new how to use MS Word. However, you only
had to try it once to see how archaic and inflexible it was. The company ditched
it after a few months and replaced it with a web server.
Personally, I
think tablets and smart phones are going to kill MS Word. Word processors are
all about fitting text precisely on a fixed size page. Web pages are all about
letting text adapt itself to whatever space is available. Once tablets are
common in business, why would people routinely print out pages on paper? There
may be special cases where paper can't be replaced, but for 95 - 99% of current
paper consumption cases, there is no need for printing if you can use a table
instead.
If you are using a tablet, then a word processor makes no
sense. Tablets and smart phones inherently come in varying sizes. The work
processor concept doesn't work there. Instead of pixel perfect text rendering on
a fixed page size, you need something that automatically adapts itself to
varying conditions. Well, we already have that, it's called HTML web pages. That
solves a whole host of problems associated with trying to use word processor
documents in a non-trivial business environment. We don't need better clones of
Microsoft Word. We need software and systems that help businesses abandon the
word processor concept.
I can still see a need for spreadsheets, but I
seriously doubt that it really matters what spreadsheet most people use. Yes,
for some financial uses it may matter, but for most people it doesn't. Most
people actually seem to use spreadsheets as small databases to organize and sort
data or to do simple ad-hoc calculations. Virtually any spreadsheet would do for
that, and they can be selected on price just like any other purchase. If the
bean counters need a specific spreadsheet, then give it to them. There is no
need to force their spreadsheet choice on everyone else. We don't after all
insist that the bean counters need AutoCAD just because the engineers use
it.
So yes, I think the Internet matters. Only, businesses haven't
really adapted to it yet and are still working in ways that assume the computer
is just a better typewriter.
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