Ok, so this is a post evolved from the Gillmor Gang again, its a dammed interesting and thought-provoking set of podcasts and I try to keep uptodate on them walking the dog and commuting into the office;
I really appreciate their views and the thought leadership they offer and it does stimulate valuable thoughts in my own mind... but sometimes I do feel that the views they are offering although valid actually only apply to a small subset of our eco-sphere and maybe just bits of the blogo-sphere, I'm convinced that they are cool and should be headed by a whole heap of tech savvy people that have the knowledge and appetite for change and for pushing the envelope, but not the rest of them...
Take Steve Gillmor's comments about Microsoft Office he has said in a number of recent and probably historic podcasts that "Office is dead" that the likes of Google Office will be dominant in the very near future... Arse is what I say; not because I think Office is great or a world beater, but because its what people know and are comfortable with (issues and all) and because of reasons I'll discss now...
Its obvious that one of the premises of the whole web.20 world is based around web access and great bandwidth and thats fine, most of us enjoy good access both at work and home and if your lucky on the move as well, but away from the US (and possibly within as well) does everyone have great bandwidth? How many people do you know that complain that their "work internet access" is less performant than at home... LOTS, even though bandwidth availability and cost is getting better by the month and thats because most companies that have been around for a while have creaking infrastructure, patched-up, not scaled up and suffering.. and if the wave and onslaught of web-based office productivity solutions hits these companies with a heap of bandwidth traffic for all employees all of the time some companies connectivity will grind to a hault..performance will be back to web.0.5 days and they won't be happy.. take-up may do a nose-dive, reputation (and investments) will suffer and these things will become the toys of the personal productivity world, not the business world...
OK thats one scenario I guess, and a real possibility; I do hope this isn't the view through the crystal-balls, but I think we need to consider the impacts and constraints that businesses and their infrastructures have...
On the other hand Office 2007 looks the pups-nuts and the features and user experience looks (I havent played with the Betas yet) great...but how much of a hefty-fat-lardy-git is the client....? I have a 3 year old PC, 1/2 Gb RAM and not enough hard-disk estate; with all the crap on my machine will it stand-up to being on my machine...maybe not and that will be dissapointing I enjoy evangelising Microsoft solutions, I like having them on my machine and showing customers what they can do, how they can be innovative.. but if I have to strip out most of my apps and stick to running just a couple of key things then thats not gonna be good, thats not what I want and Hey, maybe the new Apple Boot Camp maybe just the thing I need a cool new machine with a little more power to run my fat-windows-clients..??
So my stream of consciousness is complete; or rather I'm knackered and wanna go home.. my conclusion is just like I think Mike Arrington said (sory if I got the wrong guy) the answer is both... the nirvana is a transparent combination (not Mash-up) of both solutions delivering what we want, where and when we want it, in a format we desire and in a connected manner....
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