Friday, May 14, 2010

What Is Microsoft Up To?

I love Adobe Creative Suite. I want the very latest version. I love my Motorola / Google Droid. I can't wait for the next OS push where I'll be able to use Flash. All of my computers run Microsoft. From years and years ago.

I haven't bought a new Microsoft product in years and I don't see the need to do so. Adobe Creative Suite 5 has me drooling, but Windows 7 or the latest Office leaves me cold. What's the point? My XP machines and Office 2003 can do everything I want. While I eagerly await the latest from Adobe and Google, I couldn't care less what Microsoft does. Wondering just what their plan was, I searched for keynote talks from MS Convergence 2010. Here's one of the videos I found.


So Microsoft will allow you the same features as a wiki, only you'll have to pay for it? That's not very exciting. Since all I want to do with my word processing is create basic documents and then move on to something more interesting, all of the wondrous features of Word 2007 or Word 2010 don't interest me. I'd rather just use the wiki, particularly since a wiki gives me what I really want - a document that lives on the web. Word gives me a file on a hard drive somewhere.

I watched a few more videos and it became obvious that Microsoft has aimed itself firmly at the corporate world. Unfortunately, it's tools are from a software architecture model that dates back to 2003. I want things that either build be a beautiful, effective web presence or create apps and widgets for mobile devices. Documents on a hard drive? Sorry, but I've got all I need.

4 comments:

Jeff Burton said...

Can't imagine going back to XP/Office 2003. Windows 7 and Office 2007 are much better. Office Live Spaces is a great place to store docs and I'm excited about the online apps. I use google's apps quite a bit, so looking forward to the ms versions. Combined with office live spaces, I will be that much closer to living completely in the cloud, where I want to be.

K T Cat said...

Jeff, I understand about the cloud, but where I work we've got an internal wiki that does a great job for online documents. We use Atlassian's Confluence.

K T Cat said...

By the way, Jeff, I really appreciate your comment. Since I live in the web world, I don't have sufficient appreciation for the needs and desires of those that live in a document-centric one.

Jeff Burton said...

In our company, we find ourselves using google docs more and more. The spreadsheet has become a great collaboration tool. The live update sharing is very cool.