UPDATED: Microsoft’s first Office Systems Developers Conference signals a new direction
for its aging productivity suite. Redmond has invited ISVs
Office as a platform, not a set of applications.
Microsoft has identified more than $10 billion in opportunities for
partners, and the conference, held in Redmond, Wash. on February 2 through
4, aims to show them how to get a piece of that opportunity.
Journalists and analysts were barred from attending, doubtless because
Redmond plans to offer details for the next version, which it will build on top of Longhorn.
Microsoft will likely hype the benefits of Visual Studio 2005, now in
its beta 1.1 release, but it won’t deliver the bits for the beta 2 version
until the end of the quarter. Early reports are that Visual Studio 2005,
formerly known as Whidbey, will slash development time for the .NET framework.
“With Office 2003, InfoPath and Visual Studio tools for Office, it now
takes hundreds instead of thousands of lines of code to build an application,”
said Ken Spencer, CTO of 32X Software and a Microsoft regional director. “With
Whidbey, what took hundreds of lines will take tens of lines of code.”
Making Office file formats available in XML have already enabled
developers to make Office documents more integrated into
applications, said Mike Sax, president of Sax Software, a company that builds
XML components for ISVs.
“In Office 2003, the process was essentially to have your Web application
spit out some data, then load that into a file from within Office,” he said. “The level
of integration in the next version will be much higher, and Office will be
much more of an application platform than it has been.”
In fact, he said, the next version will shift the relationship between data
and applications. “With the new Office extension tools, they can write code using
.NET that accesses either Web services or legacy systems directly. It switches from
having a bunch of applications you move data into, to making the data be the central
part, and the applications floating around that.”
Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said that, while Microsoft may be able to
provide such tools, it’s not clear whether enterprise users want them.
“Most of what Office is used for is still basic productivity,” he said. “Certainly,
there’s enormous opportunity in collaboration, as companies add more and more
employees spread across the country or world. The problem is that it’s very
unclear whether anyone knows how to do that collaboration.”
Sax said that while the market may not be immediately apparent, there is
definitely an opportunity for developers to get their hands on some of that
$10 billion.
“When a huge opportunity for value like Office integration presents
itself, the market will follow,” he said. “It may take the form of new tools offered
to customers or software vendors integrating Office with their vertical applications.”
And Spencer of 32X thinks Office 2005 will become a “powerful strategic
investment” for companies, because it will allow regular business users to
take over tasks that are central to their work, relieving IT of administration
and reducing bottlenecks. Instead of working on “client” PCs, their machines
become interfaces to the application platform.
“Out of all our Fortune 100 customers, I don’t think a single one is not
investing in either SharePoint or SharePoint Portal server,” he said.
The conference could hold the key to Microsoft’s future.
It needs a cadre of developers working with Office.
“The Office market is saturated and fragmented,” said JupiterResearch analyst
Joe Wilcox. “Most people that need it or want it, have it. Most people that need
it or want it are sticking with the version or versions they have.” (JupiterResearch
and internetnews.com are owned by Jupitermedia.)
Wilcox said
it’s not unusual for companies to run four or five different versions of Office.
Moreover, Microsoft continues to battle the threat of open source software,
as governments and educational institutions around the globe routinely evaluate
the Linux OS and versions of the OpenOffice productivity suite along with Windows.
Microsoft has made motions toward increasing openness. In November 2003,
it offered
its XML schemas for Office under royalty-free licensing. The Office applications
use schemas
are saved as XML files.
But Jupiter’s Wilcox said that offering access to the schemas on a
non-royalty basis is a far cry from true interoperability between Office
and other productivity suites.
He pointed out that Microsoft doesn’t participate in the Organization for
the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, a body that’s developing
e-business standards, including OpenDocument, a standard for productivity suites.
There’s good reason.
“Once you have an open standard, the authoring tool no longer matters,”
Wilcox said. “On the other hand, if you have an accepted standard, it can
create more competition and choice.”
For example, the de facto digital imaging
standards .GIF and .JPEG have created a thriving marketplace with lots of
choices in devices and applications. “We don’t have something comparable in the productivity
suite market,” Wilcox said, “because one company is dominant there and has
control over those formats.”
While Microsoft appeals to the needs of the Fortune 200, there will be room
for competition, said Sam Hiser, marketing development lead for OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice develops an open-source productivity suite designed to compete with
Microsoft Office.
In licensing the schemas, Hiser said, “Microsoft is just not
going to be open enough. If they can be more open and meet customer needs,
they’ll staunch some of the erosion. But they won’t staunch it all, as aggressive
as they can be.”
Perhaps that’s why Redmond is rallying the troops of Office developers: To
get them to go out and extend the market as much as they do the software itself.
Updates prior version to correct spelling of Spencer and Whidbey
