Long live Office 14

Having reflected on the impact of the Office 14 online and collaboration features I have to wonder what the road map for the Microsoft Groove platform is?

Groove is a very smart set of features that was available in Office that allowed users to work in an online/offline manner on documents and discuss what was happening. However, I now see that large chunks of this capability  is now being included in the next release of Office. 

Groove was always crippled by the licensing implications and was, in my opinion, only ever included because Ray Ozzie gave birth to it before he came to Microsoft. So it is nice to see that the collaboration is finally being embedded in the Office system as it should be.

Mind you I will be VERY interested to see just how they work the Licensing of all of this. Will one Office license cover online and offline etc. The legal pain is almost too painful to imagine. Just look at the pain the Microsoft Multiplexing license causes now integrating MSCRM with SharePoint . Then throw in online documents and the Azure services and you hit a world of pain!

We live in interesting times

Some years ago I ran my own small development house that specialized in writing applications for small and medium businesses in my local area. Much like Vlad is often saying we had to do a sanity check on where the business was heading. At the time there were 3 key features that were on our horizon:

1. Big boys coming down the food chain. It was clear that the likes of Microsoft and alike were targeting smaller and smaller companies with their Line of Business applications. This would mean that our customers would be able to get 80% functionality for way less than we could build 100% of the  functionality.
2. Rent – a Coder expectations. Even then we were competing against the outsource world. In particular the expectation levels that they set. More and more customers were expecting to be paying outsourced prices BUT getting traditional quality, control and budgetary reliability. Shame it never works but that’s the mind set.
3. Technology Route March.  We realized that we were having to learn and assimilate at least one new technology every 2 projects just to keep up. Whilst we all liked new technology and enjoyed it it was EXPENSIVE to have to learn all the time just to keep up. We had to keep up because if we fell behind we would loose productivity which would put us even further behind the Rent – a – coders.

The end result was to realize that there were only 2 routes forward; massive scale up or pack up and join someone who has done a massive scale up. We chose the latter.

The point of all of this is that the technology route march is about to step up the pace by an order of magnitude.

Not since the release of the .NET framework have I seen as much fundamental change being released as is being let loose at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC)

Just looking through the recent channel 9 videos about what is coming at the PDC shows how massively the ASP model  cloud computing world will again be changing the way applications will work. Just watching this video shows the huge step change that is coming. An online scalable system with all the capabilities of a full scale business system, web services, databases and workflow.

All in all I feel justified in making the choices I did as only the big players can afford to maintain momentum whilst absorbing the sea changes that are coming.

PS. I am also in awe of the founding architects of the .NET vision that has taken the core concept through so many unforeseen changes whilst still being flexible enough to cope.  

Last week I posted about a demo Microsoft did at the BI conference that used their surface table to deliver a BI demo.

Well nismith got backstage for this demo and got a sneak peak.

UPDATE – looks like the video has been pulled – dont know why but I have emailed to ask for it back

A very cool demo – reality, no (unless Microsoft want to loan me a Surface Table, Hint Hint),  but a good thought provoking idea.

EDIT

I have come up with a nice scenario that could merge BI and the Surface platform:

We shop at our local Sainsburys’ which has a loyalty card scheme called Nectar. It also has a Starbucks in store.

My idea is that in the Starbucks they could have Surface tables. if you put your Nectar card on the table it could read the unique barcode on the card and then display the BI data about the spending I have done over time at the supermarket.

I could then look at my spending patterns whilst sipping my latte and the supermarket could also be serving up contextual adverts.

I win by seeing where my budget goes and the supermarket wins with access to an engaged audience.

No doubt one day!

Slightly off topic but…

Scott Hanselman has developed an application called Baby Smash that is a WPF application that allows babies to interact with an application designed for them by “smashing” on the keyboard.

As I understand it it was a way for him to explore the WPF framework that would also be of use for is new family. By a combination of seeking feature requests and a conspiracy over at Channel9 the most requested feature was for a networked Massively Multiplayer Online BabySmash so Babies can Smash together.

The end result is that he will be developing such a feature live during his PDC talk and inviting the audience members to join in and try it.

So the image is…

A room full of grown up geeks smashing their keyboards and “imitating” a bunch of 2 year olds.

please God let someone video it!

Thanks to Jane for an interesting write up on the ReMix UK conference particularly the internationalization section.

What she also pointed out was Fiddler a network analysis tool that could be useful at some point.