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"From the earliest days as a marketing slogan, the elusive concept of the so-called paperless office may finally be taking shape, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. A growing number of small businesses and startups, unencumbered by legacy processes, are quietly ditching printouts for an all-digital ecosystem, buoyed by soaring BYOD ownership and growing familiarity with a plethora of cloud services. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Perhaps not-so-surprisingly, the driving factors are collaboration and productivity, as opposed to any ecological or "green" concerns. With this in mind, we take a look at the advantages of going digital, and outline how workers can embrace this new digital-first paradigm to collaborate more, do things faster and work more efficiently than ever."

"Google has been incrementally making its workplace products more and more functional - all, it seems, with one goal in mind. It would like to eat Microsoft Office 365's lunch. When it first launched Google Apps (now called Google for Work), the best feature was the cost. The products were free to use, although there was little in the way of service or advanced business functionality. But that's been changing. More companies are piggybacking on Google for Work's foundation to launch their own products and, as these products mature, continue to invest and expand them. One of the latest examples is ProsperWorks, the developer of Simple CRM for Google Apps.   "

"A new player has entered the enterprise productivity race. For decades, Microsoft reigned as the market leader in enterprise productivity - until Google pushed into the space with Google Apps. Now, with the acquisition of Quip, Salesforce is joining Microsoft and Google in the race. The implications, however, extend far beyond productivity and CRM. Recent developments in enterprise software - including Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn and Salesforce's acquisition of Demandware and Quip - point to a shift in the market. Enterprise software (not just productivity apps) can no longer be siloed applications bolted together with varying degrees of integration. Today's tools are expected to be cross-functional, with native integration, real-time collaboration and smart communication at their very core. Enterprise software giants across different verticals are moving in the direction of end-to-end solutions in an attempt to own more of the workflow - Salesforce's acquisition of Quip will only intensify the competition. For enterprise software startups, it's indicative of more mergers and acquisitions to come."

"Office productivity: Has Microsoft blown it? Microsoft has dominated the 'office productivity' tools market for decades and is a de facto way of working in most companies. Having significantly held back innovation in the last 10 years, Office is arguably reaching the end of its useful life as modern digital tools make it look like an old bureaucratic anachronism."

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon

Good interview but i'm looking for ways to short Box.net.  I left lots of sticky notes and highlights on this page - all of which are under the Visual Document list since i didn't have a Cloud Productivity list going.  I spend quite a bit of time studying Box.net, DropBox and a ton of other early Cloud sync-share-store operations while doing research for the Sursen SurDocs product.  Also MS-Live/Office/SkyDrive and Google Docs Collaboration.  No one has a good bead on a Cloud Productivity Platform yet.  But Microsoft and Google clearly know what the game is.  They even have a plan on how to get there.  Box.net, on the other hand is totally clueless.  What are these investors thinking?

"Five years ago, Google - one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity - became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees' lives. Google's People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers)."

"Six years ago, we surveyed our employees with the goal of determining the optimal place for each of them to work in terms of maximum efficiency and productivity. What we quickly determined was that no one wanted to work in the office. Workers Can't Concentrate in the Office When asked to identify the best place to get work done - specifically work that requires maximum concentration and creativity, such as designing a web page, programming new functionality for software, developing a financial report or writing a sales proposal - not a single member of our 34-member team chose the office. Rather, they selected: An extra room at their home Their favorite coffee shop A train or airplane Our finding wasn't an anomaly. In a much larger study based on 2,600 interviews, FlexJobs concluded that 76 percent of workers prefer to avoid the office when they have important work to do."

"When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant's cloud business. And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft's Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company-and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals. But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google's Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS's $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it's even a distant third behind Azure's $1.1 billion in estimated sales. Starting today, Mar. 23, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google's cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene's first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond. Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google's container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google's Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. "NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction we've gotten," he said."

"Either way, customers win. In early November Microsoft announced a new product called Microsoft Teams. It's a way for groups of people, typically colleagues inside a company, to communicate with each other over multiple, simultaneous conversations. It will be part of the software giant's online Office 365 product, the "productivity" subscription program used by 85 million "knowledge workers" around the world. More than a billion additional customers use the offline version of Office. A relatively small group of people-4 million, to be precise-will recognize something familiar about the new Microsoft offering. That's because it's more or less what a San Francisco startup called Slack does. Microsoft is adding a few bells and whistles, including easier-to-follow threaded conversations and video conferencing. Slack, which took the charmingly old-fashioned step of buying a newspaper ad to "welcome" Microsoft to its game, has said it will match those features. (Fortune, like many journalism organizations, uses Slack; after a year of steadily increasing usage, I've grown to like it.) This isn't the first time Microsoft has unveiled a "Slack killer." In fact, it is becoming something of an annual event. What's more, Slack is growing fast. It has 4 million users, up from 1.25 million a year ago. About 30% of those customers pay either $6.67 or $12.50 per month for the product, depending on which features they use. My back-of-the-envelope calculation of Slack's annual revenue, assuming all customers pay the average of the two price points, is around $140 million. "You're pretty close," Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield told me just before Thanksgiving. "

"Today Microsoft starts shipping Office for iPad, finally plugging the gap in its portfolio that's been filled by popular document viewers and editors like QuickOffice and SlideShark.   Does this come too late for Microsoft? As much as naysayers like to proclaim Office is dying, people still overwhelmingly use it at home and at work. Office is supported at virtually every organization. Our survey of Forrester clients at the end of last year showed strong strides by Google Docs with 13% of firms using it.* However, the caveat is companies that have gone Google are using Docs to complement Office with collaboration features and mobile support, not to replace it.   You could argue how much incremental revenue Microsoft lost out on, but I don't think the lack of native Office apps has caused Microsoft to cede ground to other office productivity suites on the PC, where the vast majority of content is still created. Keep in mind that out of the 20% of information workers in North America and Europe that use a tablet for work, 60% of them use some office productivity software on it.** Half of tablets used for work are iPads. So immediately just 6% of information workers will be considering the Office apps as an alternative to what they are using on their tablets today.    Is Microsoft really multi-platform now?"

"Software, software everywhere and not a drop to drink.  Every day it feels as if a new app is released into the digital workplace ecosystem which promises to make employees more productive, more efficient, more valuable. Yet headlines and studies continue to sound alarms with reports of stagnating growth and slowing productivity. Could it be that we're measuring the wrong things? That the value today's knowledge workers (among others) provide isn't actually being recognized?"

"Microsoft quietly updated its Office 2016 Preview apps for early adopters over the past two weeks with a slew of new features the company announced in a round-up Wednesday. The new features let people who have installed the public beta of Microsoft's forthcoming productivity suite update try out real-time collaboration capabilities that will be rolling out more broadly later this year, along with other changes that make it easier to find particular functions and gather contextual information about what they're working on. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Word 2016 now has support for Live Typing, which allows desktop users to see the edits their colleagues are making to a shared document in real time. It builds on a feature unveiled last month that let users see where colleagues were working within a document, but didn't immediately show the words they added. Similar features should be coming to other Office apps with future updates, so that people can work in real time on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft already offers a real-time, co-authoring feature inside Office Online, but this update brings those capabilities onto the desktop for the first time within Microsoft's productivity suite. It will be possible for people to collaborate in real time across Office Online and Office on the desktop when Office 2016 launches later this year, but until then, users will have to choose between collaborating inside a Web app or inside a desktop app. That feature set puts Office in closer competition with Google's productivity suite, which has grown in popularity and features robust support for real-time collaboration. "

"We just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data: One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14 percent) than Google Apps (9 percent).  Just 22 percent of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36 percent have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13 percent of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5 percent. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13 percent of companies. "

The articles about Charles Jolley and Strobe continue.  This time it's ReadWriteWeb.  They do a much better job explaining Strobe and the business model Strobe seeks to implement.  IMHO, Strobe's concept for mitigating the exchange of data across server domains could be ODBC for Cloud Productivity. ODBC and OLE are of course inter-application processes essential to the desktop productivity environment and the creation of compound documents.  I'll try to contact Charles and discuss this. "One of the big reasons I left [Apple] is because I really believe that the next great app ecosystem for mobile especially, but also for PCs and television, is going to be built around HTML5," Jolley tells RWW. "If you look at the people who are building mobile apps today, 70% of those people will say they want to use HTML5. But a lot of them don't make it to market, except for a few large companies like Amazon and Financial Times, most people aren't able to deliver HTML5 apps." The Apple platform for apps delivery is rich and compelling, Jolley points out. Unlike an ordinary "open" platform that, almost by definition now, is all self-service, Apple provides direct, personal business services to help developers organize themselves and get on their feet, even if their employer is already recognized around the world. Then Apple provides hosting and deployment services, managing user entitlements and licenses. It creates an ecosystem and then nourishes the entities that live within it, and that's why Apple's platform works as well as it does. "Apple makes it very, very easy for someone to build an app and take it to market. You have these small groups of one or two people who can create businesses around them. And today with HTML5, that's simply not possible," says Jolley. "Even though there's a huge benefit to HTML5 - you can be in any app store, you can go direct to the consumers, you can build any kind of business model you want - if you're going to reach all the 1.2 billion p

"The Best of Microsoft Productivity If you're like me when you work, you want to really get things done. We need to be able to seamlessly move between our work and personal needs. Building on our success of more than 200 million devices running Windows 10, the Lumia 650 puts Microsoft's smooth, responsive and most productive OS in your pocket. Our business customers continue to send great feedback on Windows 10 and are compelled by the mobility of the Windows experience across devices. Lumia 650 runs the latest Microsoft Office apps right out of the box, allowing you to create and edit documents on-the-go and sync them to the cloud via OneDrive. It's also perfect for picking up on email and an important presentation during your commute. And with Cortana, your very own personal assistant, you're always organized and prepared for the day ahead."

"Shortly after the start of the millennium, Microsoft stated a goal to be the go-to enterprise platform for the data center. Many in the industry scoffed at the idea that Microsoft could dominate in a market traditionally led by Unix. Today, there are few enterprises that don't have a significant investment in Microsoft servers and infrastructure. Five years ago Microsoft launched Office 365 and, right now, we're seeing a parallel in their move to lead the cloud office application sector. Office and the enterprise applications that support Office 365-Exchange, SharePoint and Skype for Business - have become ubiquitous in the market. In July this year, it was reported that Office 365 is used daily by over 70 million enterprise users. However, Microsoft hasn't achieved this success without challenges. In 2013, many industry pundits saw Google Apps for Enterprise as the heir apparent for cloud and productivity, but things have changed significantly in the last three years. Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has rebranded to support its 'mobile-first, cloud- first' go-to-market. The move to support Office on the Apple and Google platforms has strengthened its position in the market. Following this success, their next ambition is to enable customers and partners to move to Office 365. Earlier this year, Microsoft launched a number of initiatives to help clients consume Office 365 licenses more effectively. One such program is geared towards securing the license base by motivating renewals and preventing-churn versus a completely new sale. Once a client activates and consumes the licenses on Office 365, they receive ongoing upgrades, renewals, and new features as part of an evergreen service. Employees experience the latest across all their devices. This compares favorably to the historical process of waiting every three to four years for the on-premises Enterprise Agreement to be signed and subsequent refresh of a laptop with a new office applica

"When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple Inc. last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant's cloud business. And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Corp.'s Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company-and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals. But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google's Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS's $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it's even a distant third behind Azure's $1.1 billion in estimated sales. This week, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, starting Wednesday in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google's cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene's first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond. Searching for a cloud coup Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google's container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google's Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. "NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction

"Samsung on Wednesday announced its intentions to support early-stage startups focused on emerging technologies. The company, through its global innovation group, has established a $150 million fund targeting businesses specializing in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and "other new frontier technologies." So far, Samsung has made investments in 10 startups: Converge Industries, Dashbot, Entry Point VR, Filament, Intezer, LiquidSky, Otto Radio, 2Sens, SafeDK, and Virtru. The fund is aimed at making pre-seed to series B investments. "Our investments bring the power of the Samsung platform to startups to accelerate their growth and ultimately their success," said Brendon Kim, vice president and the managing director of Samsung's Next Ventures. "The Samsung NEXT Fund expands our global reach and capabilities, while increasing Samsung's access to more great ideas, products and talent." Samsung declined to specify how much each startup receives. In addition, it appears that the company could be targeting those in Israel next, with the opening of a new office in Tel Aviv, Israel in September. There are now five offices worldwide dedicated to innovation, including San Francisco, Mountain View, Korea, and New York. More locations are planned later this year. Samsung Next formerly was known as the Global Innovation Center. The name change was done because "our new name reflects our passion for partnering with tech innovators to take them to the NEXT level - build great ideas into products, grow products into thriving businesses and scale businesses that leverage and transform the Samsung ecosystem.""