In
a micro-content world, business documents are broken down into their
constituent elements: notification, transaction, context, priority and
lifetime. IM traffic, Weblog posts, breaking news, appointments, alerts
and good old e-mail comprise a dominant percentage of micro-content
traffic. Managing the real-time flow of information becomes Job One,
followed closely by archiving and publishing snapshots of the data as
"documents."
The traditional productivity applications
become rendering engines for various end-stage documents. Word produces
spell-checked, formatted pages; Excel produces reports, charts and
graphs; PowerPoint produces presentations. In its current incarnation,
Outlook renders messages. FrontPage—well, FrontPage is being sunsetted
by Weblog-authoring tools.
To be sure, Microsoft can take comfort in its strategy of waiting
for the competition to do the R&D and then swooping in when the
market is primed. Micro-content authoring tools are in their infancy,
held back by the lack of resources in mom-and-pop RSS aggregator shops.
But the patent filings are giving companies such as Apple and Sun time
to seed their platforms with common services that can be bootstrapped
by small ISVs.
With e-mail attacks becoming the norm, Microsoft shops must devote
more and more cycles to combating the enterprise effects of network
slowdowns; unreliable communications; and loss of strategic data to
uncaptured channels such as IM, voice and Hotmail back channels.
That's
why social software spaces and link cosmos engines such as Technorati
are becoming mission-critical repositories for maintaining secure
communications. As RSS information routers reach the critical mass of
persistent, searchable storage, feed-tunable preferences, embedded
browser rendering, and attention data mining, the motivation to store
data in licensed document silos will flatline.
Remember:
Microsoft is competing in the micro-content space with the one
non-renewable resource: time. Nowhere in the real-time space does it
have dominant market share—not in IM, not in RSS, not in search. If it
places its chips on Word, it's competing not just against
micro-content, but against its own installed base.
There
are some signs that Gates gets it: hiring Wiki inventor Ward
Cunningham, incorporating some OneNote technology into the next Mac
Office release and even floating a rumor that he will start an internal
blog. But Longhorn still reminds me of the Las Vegas skyline, where
objects appear a lot closer than they really are.
