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Office 2.0: Publishers Confront A Long
Twilight of Personal Computers in the Enterprise |
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11 September 2006 |
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The Microsoft Windows-based PC has been a staple of
enterprise offices for more than twenty years, a technology
that has created a stable environment for publishers to
develop value-add services. But with the arrival of new
office technologies that rely on open Web-oriented
standards the broad assumption of having Windows as the
foundation for those value-add revenues is being
challenged. Office 2.0 is a nascent movement with plenty of
rough edges, but tomorrow's winners will be those
publishers who are embracing and shaping the services
available in the Office 2.0 environment today. |
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The
former headquarters of the Western Union telegraph company
lingered well into the 20th century in an aging but majestic
building on Battery Place at the tip of Manhattan. Although the
telegram was a quaint anachronism by the time I started working
down the street from it twenty years ago, you could still send
one if you were so inclined. Today
Western Union no
longer sends telegrams but is a very successful subsidiary of
First
Data Corp working out of Colorado that leverages a
worldwide network of offices to manage money transfers for
consumers and businesses. Communications, yes, but a
communications business transformed by necessity into a highly
refined model for success. The commercial telegraph itself,
though, the revolutionary communications technology of the 19th
century, has passed into history.
The Windows-based personal computer is also showing signs
that it will pass into commercial history at some point in this
century, though its parent Microsoft are already trying to
position themselves for a successful transition. Through its
Live
Office initiative Microsoft is acknowledging that a new
generation of enterprise content users are going to be creating
business information online, making it far easier to consume
content in devices other than standard Windows platforms. With
increasing questions about the performance of Microsoft's
new Vista operating system for Windows, perhaps this day will
come sooner rather than later. But whenever it does, publishers
need to be ready for environments in which Windows is not the
common denominator on business desktops.
The need for a cross-platform approach to content creation
and deployment is underscored by an emerging movement labeled
Office 2.0. In its current incarnation Office 2.0 is little
more than an upcoming
conference and a relatively small catalog of office
automation applications available via the Web and which are
based primarily on open source platforms supported by
technologies such as
AJAX and using browser-based controls largely independent
of PCs. But given the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies
supporting the "read-write Web" and their rapid adoption by
major enterprises the acceleration of content creation and
consumption in environment not beholden to Microsoft products
is likely to have an accelerated growth curve. This growth is
being accelerated by ASP-modeled services such as
Salesforce.com,
which are incorporating both enterprise content and content
from major business information suppliers, providing outsourced
integrated access to both internal and external content.
What will be the enterprise platform of the future for most
publishers? In some ways that platform is already here in the
form of browser-based content now dominating most electronic
services from publishers and aggregators. But the underlying
assumption of most publishers trying to provide value-add
services is that the broad and comfortable safety net of
Microsoft infrastructure will be there for the little "hooks"
that can help their products to distinguish themselves on
enterprise desktops. As more and more key content in
enterprises develops in collaborative environments that
eliminate the need for many of Microsoft's core strengths those
"hooks" need to move more to packaging that can be used on any
number of devices that will not have that familiar packaging to
support them.
The net result of these developments is a far more
distributed approach to business information that leaves
publishers with some major issues to address over the next
several years. A few key factors:
- Desktop workflow applications are becoming a big
question mark for high-end revenues. At the very top of
the market there are pockets in which enterprises will
continue to pay for Windows-based software for applications
with a high payback. However the building surge of
collaborative software based on AJAX technologies and the
prevalence of browsers as the common interface for those
seeking content call into question of just how quickly
publishers should be pushing into Windows-integrated workflow
solutions. In the push for next-quarter earnings these kinds
of concerns may seem like background noise. But in a few
years the ability of publishers to maintain margins at the
top end of their enterprise markets may hinge very directly
on how deeply they were thinking about platform independence
today.
- Supporting print is going to get complicated.
While Adobe PDF documents are the most common print-friendly
format for electronic information from publishers. With the
rise of Office 2.0 alternatives the barriers are lowered for
XML-based content to build print-friendly materials without
having to rely on Adobe's somewhat ponderous approach to
document display. There is an enormous library of Adobe PDF
materials that's not going to disappear overnight, of course,
but with lighter open source software providing alternatives
for print display based on XML-formatted files the future of
print-formatted materials is much less clear than it was even
a year ago. Publishers need to make sure that they are on the
right industry technology committees to consider how their
needs are best met in a rapidly evolving market for on-demand
print services.
- A lot of assumptions about DRM packaging may be going
out the window. Many enterprise-oriented publishers and
content technology companies have been playing a relatively
passive role in DRM standards, even as enterprises themselves
have been very active in adopting leading DRM technologies
for their own use. The hope of many in publishing was that
Microsoft's Windows Vista platform would help sort this all
out. But with the delay of Vista and the pressing need for
compliance and privacy controls many non-Microsoft DRM
alternatives have taken root. This leaves publishers with a
mixed field of DRM standards through which their content
needs to be deployed rapidly in the emerging collaborative
environments being used by today's enterprises. Few
enterprise-oriented publishers have taken this requirement
seriously to date, but it promises to be one of the most
important technology factors on which will hinge future
revenues in a Web-centric enterprise information environment.
As the Western Union experience illustrates it can
take a long time for one generation's key technologies to make
their way into the history books. The lights won't be going out
in Redmond any time soon, but in an era in which technology has
greatly accelerated the pace of change in publishing you can
expect that transition to be more rapid than many expect today.
Office 2.0, your time has come.
-
John Blossom
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