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Gary Edwards

We Can No Longer Unbundle Microsoft Office - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...cannot-unbundle-office-anymore

wordsdk Office-365 office-formats Office-Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • In 2007, productivity reached the cloud when the EU forced Microsoft to open the file formats to OpenXML and add an x at the end of our familiar file extensions .pptx, .xlsx and .docx. Google Docs also quickly floated cloud versions of each Office document format. However, in the same year, Apple launched iPhone without a view to file storage on the device. Since then a lot of startup innovation came from Dropbox and Box unbundling file storage from the OS, but software that enables the creation and editing of files on touchscreen devices has been less of a concern.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 14
       
      2007 was also the year that Apple released the first iPhone. ISO standardised PDF with a unique very valuable attribute; "tags". Tagged PDF raced into the mobility breach enabling all kinds of data binding and digital signature advances critical to mobile document centric workflows. In 2008 we saw a global financial collapse that put more pressure than ever on productivity. To survive, companies had to do more with less. Less people, less resources and less money. Cloud computing and mobility rose to the occasion, but the timing of the cloud tsunami connects the incredible synchronicity of XML compound document formats (business documents), Tagged PDF, the iPhone, and the financial collapse of 2008. The rise of sync-share-store services like DropBox is a natural replacement of the local, workgroup bound, client/server hard drive problem. Most importantly though, the iPhone is the first device to integrate and combine communications with computation. The data had to move to the Cloud before it could become useful to mobile apps combining for the first time, communications, content and computation is hand held devices. Anyone who ever worked in the Microsoft client/server productivity ecosystem will tell you that the desktop PC was totally lacking in "communications"; let alone the kind of integrated communications that the iPhone offers. It is the integration of communications, content and collaborative computation that will make the productivity of Cloud Computing something extraordinary.
  • Three years ago, CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar started using OpenXML formats to bring Microsoft Office to iPad. Since then, the company opened its interface to file authoring tools from Office and Google Drive, and storage providers like Dropbox, Box and Hightail, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and will soon be hard at work adding Apple’s CloudDrive. CloudOn feels that if it focuses on providing the best compatibility and exportability across devices, then they can be the place where users can “preserve, render and manipulate” documents on mobile. Once CloudOn can maintain its goal of giving consumers a familiar look and feel and lossless publishing for all the most popular document creation and storage providers, they plan to optimize for touchscreens. CloudOn sees only single-digit-minute session times in files, so their next step is to enable gestures to edit charts and annotate text with your fingers to help make better use of that time.
  • Feature-bundled workflows to get things done on the device you’re looking at are necessities, not nice pairings like chocolate and peanut butter.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Pellucid Analytics takes a different strategy to rebuilding PowerPoint. Instead of looking at PowerPoint as a design tool, Pellucid fixes the design and enables archive search for thousands of financial accounting slide templates that an analyst would need to fill a pitch book such as ROE, EBITDA and other fun acronyms. Since the formatting is already set, analysts can just enter company names and based on the data sources that the bank they work for has licensed, Pellucid can fill in any of that data automatically and keep it up to date. However, the concept of live data in presentations is a shock to most bankers, so Adrian Crockett of Pellucid admits that it’s one of the first things he has to explain to new users. Of course, Pellucid offers the ability to snapshot data for use in later presentations. But Adrian stressed that in addition to Pellucid’s approach to removing grunt work for analysts, it is giving senior bankers access to live data right in the presentation that would normally require VPN access, logins, app switching and all other sorts of headaches to be able to access, especially on tablets.
Gary Edwards

Google Brings Native MS Office Editing Features To Its iOS Productivity Apps - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...y-apps-launches-slides-for-ios

wordSDK Office-365 Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Google’s new Material Design user interface language and all the Microsoft Office conversion goodness the company acquired when it bought Quickoffice in 2012.
  • Google is closing the loop on bringing support for natively editing Microsoft Office files to all of productivity apps today.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 14
     
    "Google is closing the loop on bringing support for natively editing Microsoft Office files to all of productivity apps today. The company's iOS apps for Docs and Sheets are getting a couple of minor new features and design updates today, but most importantly, these apps will now also be able to natively open, edit and save files from Microsoft's Office suite. After launching the original standalone apps for Google Docs and Sheets on iOS a few months ago, it was only a matter of time before Google would also free its PowerPoint competitor Slides from the Google Drive app. Today is that day. Google Slides is now available as a standalone app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. 2014-08-25_1104Just like the Docs and Sheets apps and their counterparts on Android (the standalone Slides app launched there two months ago), the new Slides app will feature some aspects of Google's new Material Design user interface language and all the Microsoft Office conversion goodness the company acquired when it bought Quickoffice in 2012." ........................................................... Hey, Google is pulling the Cloud version of "bait and switch". The bait is calling a standalone application for iOS "native". The switch is that Microsoft is using the term "native" to describe the editing of MS Office native documents. Google is trying to market a native, written explicitly for iOS application, presenting it as "supporting native document editing and collaboration". Wow. They've got nothing!! This is just market spin. And the article's title suggests that they know exactly what they are doing with this egregious misrepresentation. There is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft has committed to the "Office 365 - native document" narrative. Its designed to totally obliterate Googe, Dropbox, Box, iCloud and anyone trying to offer Cloud based business solutions. They are going to crush Google, taking both Android and Booble Apps / GoogleDrive out of th
Gary Edwards

ODF Civil War: Bulll Run - Suggested Changes on the Metadata proposal - OASIS ODF - 0 views

www.oasis-open.org/...msg00072.html

metadata odf odf-civil-war ooxml

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • From our perspective it would be better to aim for doing the job in ODF 1.2, even if that requires delay. We will oppose ODF 1.2 at ISO unless the interoperability warts are cleaned up. What the market requires is no longer in doubt. See the slides linked above and further presentations linked from this page, < http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6474/5935>. Substantial progress toward those goals would seem to be mandatory to maintain Europe's preference for a harmonized set of file formats that uses ODF to provide the common functionality. Delaying commencement of such work enhances the likelihood that governments will tire of waiting for ODF to become interoperable with MS Office and simply go with MOOXML. We may not be able to force Microsoft to participate in the harmonization work, but we will be in a far better position if we have done everything we can in aid of that interoperability without Microsoft's assistance. As the situation stands, we have what is known in the U.S. as a "Mexican stand-off," where neither side has taken a solitary step toward what Europe has requested. We have decided to do that work via a fork of ODF; it is up to this TC whether it wishes to cooperate in that effort.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    This is the famous marbux response to Sun regarding Sun's attempt to partially implement ODF 1.2 XML-RDF metadata.  It's a treasure.

    There is one problem with marbux's statement though.  We had decided long ago not to fork ODF even if the five iX "interoperability enhancement" proposals were refused by the OASIS ODF TC.   This assurance was provided to Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez witht he the first ODF iX proposal submitted on July 12th, 2006.  Louis ended up signing off on three iX proposals before his resignation October 4th, 2006.

    The ODF iX enhancements were essential to saving ODF in Massachusetts.  Without them, there was no way our da Vinci plug-in could convert existing MSOffice documents and processes to ODF with the needed round trip fidelity.

    For nearly a year we tried to push through some semblance of the needed iX enhancements.  We also tried to push through a much needed Interoperability Framework, which will be critical to any ISO approval of ODF 1.2.

    Our critics are correct in that every iX effort was defeated, with Sun providing the primary opposition. 

    Still rather than fork ODF, we are simply going to move on. 

    On October 4th, 2006, all work on ODF da Vinci ended - not to be resumed unless and until we had the ODF iX enhancements we needed to crack the MSOffice bound workgroup-workflow business process barrier.

    In April of 2007, with our OASIS membership officially shredded by OASIS management, bleeding from the List Enhancement Proposal doonybrook, and totally defeated with our hope - the metadata XML-RDF work, we threw in the towel.

    Since then we've moved on to CDF, the W3C Compound Document format.  Incredibly, CDF is able to do what ODF can not.  With CDF we can solve the three primary problems confronting governments and MSOffice bound workgroups everywhere. 

    The challenge for these g
Gary Edwards

Adobe's Latest Acquisition Creates Buzz Around Office Docs - Flock - 0 views

www.wired.com/...adobe_acquisition

interoperability msoffice msoffice-live office20

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07 - Cached
  • Adobe's foray into online productivity is unlikely to keep Microsoft's Steve Ballmer awake at night. But document sharing and collaboration features are central to Google's web-based office suite.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Dec 07
     
    For a Web 2.0 application, Buzzword is very slick.  It's more sophisticated and feature rich than Glide Writer, which is also written on Adobe Flex.  Glide however offers an incredible array of portable office 2.0 features.  It's the whole enchilada.  And, Glide runs on iPhone!

    Another interesting plus for Glide is that Google uses Glide Presentations for their on line PowerPoint alternative.  Which is to say, Google is likely to purchase Glide while Adobe tries to build on Buzzword.

    One of the disturbing things for me is that Buzzword uses a proprietary file format!  In the future they will provide conversion to ODF, but that will probably be based on the OpenOffice conversion engine.  Which everyone in the Web 2.0, Office 2.0, enterprise 2.0 space uses.  Including Google.

    The thing is, the OpenOffice conversion engine lacks the conversion fidelity to crack into existing MSOffice bound business processes.

    Because they can't crack into these existing MSOffice bound business processes, the entire Office 2.0 sector is at risk.  All it takes is a competing entry from Microsoft, and the entire sector will ge twiped out by the superior interoperability - integration advantage to the MSOffice - Outlook desktop that Microsoft owns and carefully guards.

    Oh wait.  That just happened today with the announcement of MSOffice Live!  Suspiciously timed to take the oxygen out of Adobe's announcement too.

    ~ge~



Gary Edwards

Can Microsoft Count on Inertia to Spur Office 2010 Upgrades? | Eric Lai - CIO Article C... - 0 views

comments.cio.com/489648

msoffice ooxml odf html webkit iphone

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 09
     
    This article left me a bit confused. The author poses an important question about the next release of MSOffice; MSOffice 2010. Or what others have called MSOffice 11. The question is whether or not end users will buy into the new features, and continue on the upgrade treadmill as they have for the past 15 years or so. Strangely though, there is no discussion of the traditional factors binding end users to the upgrade treadmill. Things like ever changing formats, protocols and interfaces. Nor is there discussion as to the impact of marketplace demands that Microsoft comply with open standards; including open document exchange formats like ODF, OOXML and HTML+ (the advanced WebKit-Ajax document model).

    The thing is, it's more than simple "inertia" that compels people to jump on the upgrade treadmill. The ODF pilot studies conducted in Massachusetts, California, Denmark and Belgium brought into sharp focus the difficulties workgroups have in replacing MSOffice. Years of client/server systems designed to run within the MSOffice productivity environment has left many a business process bound to the MSOffice suite of editors and the compound documents they produce.

    I left my response in the reader feedback section of this CIO article.

    ".....In the past, the MSOffice upgrade treadmill was unavoidable due to the file format compatibility problem. As workgroups and business divisions purchased new computers with newer versions of MSOffice, resulting file format incompatibilities made workflow exchange of documents impossibly frustrating. Eventually, entire workgroups were forced into upgrading just to keep day to day business processes working....."
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