Microsoft Office Goes Kinda-Sorta Online

I keep saying it's inevitable that Microsoft will release some sort of online office suite. That day isn't here, but tonight, the company announced Office Live Workspace--an "online companion" to Office that sure sounds like a measured response to the threat to the Office hegemony posed by Google Docs and other Web-based productivity tools.

The news comes as part of a bunch of service-related announcements made by Microsoft today, including the fact that it'll offer a hosted version of its Exchange server (aimed at companies with at least 5,000 Outlook users) and is changing the name of the e-commerce services currently known as Office Live to Office Live Small Business. (Which isn't to be confused with Office 2007 Small Business, with which it doesn't have much in common.)

So what's Office Live Workspace, which isn't yet live, but accepting sign-ups here? (Good luck--I got an error message when I tried to register with one Hotmail e-mail address.) Microsoft's explanation of the service is pretty sketchy, but it'll be free, will let you store 1000+ documents online and access them from within Office (2007 and earlier versions), will have some sort of editing and collaboration features, and will offer synchronization with Outlook. In other words, it'll be something more than a Web hard drive such as Xdrive, but something short of a standalone Web suite such as those offered by Google and Zoho.

Some aspects of Office Live Workspace seem overdue (shouldn't Office have let anyone easily save documents to the Web, oh, about a decade ago?). Some are potentially intriguing, like the collaborative features. And it remains to be seen whether it'll be a coherent experience in a world where so many Microsoft competitors are making the Net the center of the productivity experience, rather than an adjunct to desktop software.

But considering that no current Web suite gives power users all the tools they'd need to even flirt with dumping Office, Office Live Workspace isn't destined to be a half-hearted response to the online suite trend. Done right, it could make plenty of sense for people who live much of their life online--and who doesn't?--but who have no desire to leave Office behind altogether. (I still think it's a given that Microsoft will have no choice but to take Office online in a more decisive fashion, though--in fact, I'd be amazed if there were no plans afoot to do that reasonably soon.)

This blog post by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has some additional details, including a statement from a Microsoft exec that Office Live Workspace will also work as a complement to other suites such as Star Office and its OpenOffice.org open-source variant. It's startling to hear anyone from Redmond pitching a new product as being useful to folks who run other suites, but I don't think Office Live Workspace will usher in a new era of Microsoft as a developer of truly open, standard Web services--I tried to sign up using Firefox on a Mac and got a message telling me I needed to be using Internet Explorer and Windows.

(It'll be a great day when Microsoft stops developing stuff that requires IE--and by that I mean it'll be a great day for both people who use Microsoft services and for Microsoft itself, if it wants to be taken seriously in the Web era. And it surely can't be that big a challenge, given that most every other provider of Web services on the planet has managed to do it.)

That's most of what we know about Office Live Workspace, which Microsoft hasn't even released screenshots of. More details as we get 'em.

DEMOFall Highlights

I'm at DEMOFall--which is, full disclosure, produced by a sister company of PC World--to see demos of scads of new products and services, mostly from itty-bitty startups. This has been an exceptionally busy season for startup-centric conferences, with both Office 2.0 and TechCrunch40 preceding DEMO. But this year, at least, there seem to be enough startups to go around--there's been almost no overlap between the three events.

A few things I've seen so far that looked useful, fun, interesting, or some combination thereof:

* If I were giving a personal award for "Best of Show--So Far" it would go to Earthmine, a geographic information application that goes beyond the already-cool photography of Google Maps' Street View. Earthmine is driving around major cities, taking very high-res photos and stitching everything together so you can look up and down in its application and view the scene from multiple angles. And its geographic database contains extremely precise info like the dimensions of buildings. Sadly, this isn't going to be a cool consumer service--the company plans to sell it to municipalities and other organzations that work with geographic data.

* I'm also seriously intrigued by Live Documents, which--this is a weird idea, but it makes perfect sense--sort of turns Microsoft Office into a competitor to Google Docs and other Web-based suites. It adds Google Docs-like collaboration, stores documents on the Web, and uses a Flash-based interface to let you edit Office documents in your browser, with an interface that looks like Office 2007 itself. I kinda want to use Live Documents before I believe it--the company says that it plans for its Web-based Flash tools to have feature parity with Office within six months, which sounds a little implausible--not that I'm not willing to be proven wrong.

* Vello is a very simple idea: It's a conference-call service that makes outgoing calls to everyone scheduled to be part of the conference, rather than waiting for them to phone in. You can schedule conferences from either your browser or a phone-based Vello app. I've got some questions about this--are you always going to know what phone number everyone wants to be called at?--but it still seems like a cool idea.

* Tubes is a new version of a service that lets you share and synchronize sets of files and create simple Web sites. Neat feature: You can give any file on your local hard drive a URL that lets people get to it over the Net. Unanswered question: Is the service's name a Ted Stevens reference?

* SceneCaster is a Web-based service that lets you assemble browser-based 3D spaces--using, if you want, objects imported from Google's 3D Warehouse--and share them. It's not a MMORPG or a virtual world like Second Life, but it looks like it might be handy for small projects--like, say, recreating a room in your house as you plan a remodeling job.

* Matchmine is trying to create an anonymous, widely used standard for personal preferences--so you don't need to tell a bevy of services what sort of movies, music, and other items you like so they can recommend new stuff to you. The demo was kind of confusing, but I like the idea.

There's lots of DEMO left--more thoughts on more demos to come...

Rex Farrance Case: News at Last

A day doesn't go by when we at PC World don't think of Rex Farrance, our friend and longtime colleague who was murdered in a home invasion in January. (Actually, I have to remind myself he's gone--oftentimes I have questions that I know he'd have the answer to, and forget that I can't walk over to his office to seek his counsel and enjoy his company.)

People often ask us about Rex, and ask if anyone was ever charged with his murder. Until today, the answer to that latter question was "No, unfortunately." But three men have been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the case. We don't have a lot of details at this point, but as more information becomes public, I'll report back here.

Those charged today are, of course, innocent until proven guilty. But after eight months without any news, this development is a relief, to say the very least...

EchoStar Snaps Up the Slingbox

This just in: Sling Media, manufacturer of the Slingbox, the cool little box that can send your home TV signal over the Internet, is now part of EchoStar Communications, the company behind the Dish Network satellite service. EchoStar paid $380 million for the company.

My first question is a selfish and overly paranoid one: What does this mean for me as someone who owns and loves a Slingbox--and uses it with Dish's archrival, DirecTV? (I just got back from Madrid, where I was very happy to be able to watch TiVo'd episodes of Keith Olbermann via Slingbox rather than CNN International on the hotel's TV.) It seems like a safe bet that current Slingboxes, and probably all future models, will continue to work with DirecTV and cable operators--Dish would be crazy to cut out the vast majority of the world who subscribes to a pay TV service that isn't theirs.

(On the other hand, it might be very smart to build satelite set-top boxes with built-in Slingbox capability, so one gadget in your living room would get you Dish programming on your TV, on your notebook, and on your phone.)

I'm curious, too, whether a Sling that's part of EchoStar will be regarded any differently by the entertainment industry than it was as an independent company. When the Slingbox first appeared, there was plenty of speculation that Hollywood would sue the company's pants off. That hasn't happened, although Major League Baseball has publicly grumbled about the device. I dunno the dynamics of the relationships involved enough to hazard a guess as to whether the acquisition means that Sling is more or less likely to run into legal hassles.

Of course, EchoStar itself is a relatively small company as entertainment titans go, and a scrappy one, too. I hope it lets Sling be Sling rather than watering down the product to avoid ticking off content owners...and that whatever happens, existing Slingboxes like mine keep on doing exactly what they do now,

Beware of Free Wi-Fi

I'm reporting in from Madrid, where I've ventured for a big international press event being held by Acer. On my way here, I had a brief layover in Chicago at O'Hare Airport. I popped open my notebook to get on Wi-Fi and check e-mail. As usual, my notebook picked up a bunch of open networks with tempting names like "Free Wi-Fi." As usual, I knew to ignore them--they were ad-hoc networks (ie, they originated on other notebooks in the vicinity, not from a router) and clearly fishy, although I didn't know exactly what the story was.

When I did connect to O'Hare's Wi-Fi network, I got something new--a pop-up message warning me to be careful about all those "Free Wi-Fi" networks. Here's the message--sorry that it's small and hard to read:

O'Hare's message seems kinda technical--it talks about SSIDs and open networks and other stuff that you don't really need to know about to use Wi-Fi--but its heart is in the right place, and I was interested to see that these fake hot spots have become a big enough problem to warrant the alert.

Here's a story from our sister publication Computerworld that covers this issue, and provides some good advice about how to protect yourself against it:

I'm still left with questions about all this, though. Lately, I often see three or four of these rogue networks almost everywhere I go where there are a meaningful number of people using notebooks. (Earlier this week at TechCrunch40, I was with a reasonably tech-savvy person who was cheerfully about to connect to a "Free Wi-Fi" network until I told her not to.)

Are there really that many scammers with notebooks out there? Or--and this seems more likely to me--are they unwitting participants with laptops that have been infected by spyware...possibly spyware which uses their notebook to swipe information from yours, then relays it to the scammer's computer?

And do we know what the chances are that your passwords or other confidential information might get stolen if you're misguided enough to connect to a "Free Wi-Fi" network?

Any additional information, educated guesses, or pointers to facts on what's going on here would be appreciated.

And one last note: At this very moment, my notebook sees an ad-hoc network that claims to be provided by OfficeMax. Do they even have OfficeMaxes here in beautiful Madrid?

More TechCrunch: Stixy's Web-Based Bulletin Boards

Yesterday at TechCrunch40

, I saw a demo of Stixy, a cool-looking free service for creating virtual bulletin boards for collaborative projects at home and at work.

There are a lot of services in this general area--Huddle.net is one--but most of 'em are pretty structured. Stixy doesn't have many features, but it has a pleasingly free-form feel: It lets everyone involved in a project drag text notes, to-dos, images, and other items around on a screen that looks a lot like a Windows or Mac desktop:

Stixy is live now, and has some demo "Stixyboards" that you can try without even registering..

More TechCrunch: Mint's Personal Finance Service

Mint is a personal finance service that may be the coolest thing I've seen so far at TechCrunch40. Plug in your account info for banks, credit cards, and other financial relationships you have, and it'll aggregate all your deposits and debts in one place. It'll remind you about bills that are due--via SMS if you like--and analyze ways that you might save money.

Part of this is in the form of advertising--Mint is free, but it'll present you offers based on its knowledge of your finances, such as a VoIP deal that's less than what you're currently playing for phone service. That sounds annoying and intrusive, but you only see the offers if you click over to a tab that lists them. The Mint demo also made a big deal about your Mint membership being anonymous; I guess that's true in the sense that it doesn't ask for your name, but giving a service access to all my financial information and accounts sure doesn't feel anonymous.

Overall, though, Mint looks slick and useful. Upon first blush I thought it was a competitor to Yodlee, a service I've used for several years to tally up my financial life. Turns out that Mint actually builds on Yodlee--with which it has a relationship--with a lot of new features and a more modern user interface.

Mint is supposedly going to go live momentarily; of everything I've seen so far, it's the one thing that makes me think "I'm going to sign up for that as soon as I can..."

More TechCrunch: New Approaches to E-Mail

I'm back for the second and final day of the TechCrunch 40 conference, and two of the first demos onstage involve fresh approaches to e-mail.

Xobni--which is Inbox spelled backwards--introduced Xobni Insight, a plug-in for Outlook that provides a whole bunch of new functions related to the people you communicate with via e-mail:

Some of the features in Insight look like they might be overkill even for hardcore e-mail users, like elaborate graphs that chart how much mail you've gotten from people. But a lot of it looks really useful, like a window that aggregates all the attachments you've gotten from one person in one place, and one that figures out the connections between people whose messages are in your inbox, creating a sort of ad-hoc social network.

I'd use Xobni Insight if it worked in Notes, which we use at PCW; Esther Dyson, who's an onstage "expert" here, just asked the Xobni folks if they'll make it work with Eudora. The company says it has plans to support other e-mail clients; a beta of the Outlook version is available now.

Then there's Orgoo, which ambitiously aims to merge all your e-mail, IM, SMS, and other communications into one service that's available both on PCs and your phone. I've seen enough all-in-one inboxes come and go over, oh, the past fifteen years or so that I'm instinctively skeptical when new ones come along. And Orgoo is still in private beta. But it looks like it'll be worth checking out when it goes live...

First Look: Google Docs...Now With Presentations

You could make a case that there's no such thing as a full-blown office suite that can't do presentations. And if that's true, Google Docs just became a full-blown office suite: As of tonight, it features the presentation features that CEO Eric Schmidt demoed back at Office 2.0 Expo in April. Google's going to formally unveil the new version tomorrow at TechCrunch40, but it's live now.

The browser-based service has also changed its name from Google Docs and Spreadsheets to just plain Google Docs. (Which is just as well--"Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations" would have been even more unwieldy than the name it already had.) The presentation features are also now part of Google Apps, the superset of Docs that also includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and other productivity tools.

The new features don't amount to a PowerPoint killer, or even a PowerPoint clone. Actually, you don't get a bunch of features which, until now, I wouldn't have thought of as optional in a presentation package, such as the ability to draw shapes, design your own templates, or create transitions.

But Docs' presentation features do let you import PowerPoint slides with adequate fidelity, and Google's Web-based collaboration features go beyond anything that Microsoft has put into PowerPoint. And that adds up to an interesting and useful service.

As with Docs' word processor and spreadsheet, its presentation tool pretty much looks like a somewhat streamlined desktop application that happens to live in your browser. In this case, that means that there's a thumbnail viewer for all your slides on the left, and a big editing window in the middle (the slides you can see below are from a PowerPoint show I imported):

Like I said, calling the editing tools basic is probably paying them a compliment. You can add and format text, import graphics, shuffle slides around, and choose from fifteen pretty-basic canned themes. At leaat all the features work the way you'd expect, and work briskly--which isn't true of their counterparts in most other online presentation apps I've tried.

Things get interesting when your work involves more than one person. As with Google Docs' word processor and spreadsheet, you can invite other people--as long as they have Google accounts--to edit your presentations, which are, of course, stored on the Web. You can also give presentations across the Web, with everybody involved seeing the show as you give it.

Well, they may see it as you give it. Google has chosen to err on the side of freedom in options given to your spectators--they can jump around in your slides, or even take control of the show and become the person who decides when the slides advance. That's a pretty democratic approach, and while I'm not sure if I'd like it for my most important shows--I'm enough of a control freak that I don't even like to give people a printout of my slides for fear they'll peek ahead--it should work well enough for informal, internal presentations. (Which are the kinds of shows that Google says Docs' new presentation features are designed to handle.)

Oh, and when you give a show, everyone involved gets a chat window so they can discuss the slides as they pop up:

All of this collaboration is simple and straightforward, but it's powerful enough that I expect that some people might opt for doing free Docs presentations over using a for-pay Web conferencing service such as WebEx--at least in certain instances. If all you want to do is get some slides online, Docs may be all you need.

You can also publish a presentation so folks can watch it later. And just in case you want to do a traditional, in-person slideshow on a PC that might not be connected to the Internet, you can save all your slides as HTML within a Zip file, so you can load them and show them on any PC with a browser.

Even if you give Google a pass on editing tools for the moment and hope that it never becomes Microsoftian bloatware, it's missing some stuff it really ought to have. You can't export your presentations in PowerPoint form. The only way to do a full-screen show is to put your browser into full-screen mode, something that Docs can't do itself. The undo feature didn't work very well for me. And the only integration with Docs' other features is an option in the word processor that lets you convert a text document into a rudimentary presentation.

Google Docs' presentation tool is, ulimately, a rough draft that thoroughly deserves the "beta" label. Will it become more polished? Google reps have told me they plan to beef up the editing tools and otherwise make Google Docs into a richer environment. Judging from the slow-but-steady progress of Docs' word processor and spreadsheet, I wouldn't expect the presentation features to acquire PowerPoint-crushing sophistication anytime soon. But I do expect Google to fill in the most glaring holes and otherwise make the service more useful in the months to come. If it gets as good as the rest of Docs, a lot of people are going to find it very useful indeed.

My personal bottom line: I don't think that Google Docs is going to reduce my reliance on PowerPoint for presentation design one bit, at least for now. Even my crudest slideshows have graphical elements such as arrows and boxes that you can't create in Docs. But when it comes time to give those presentations--especially if some members of my audience are far-flung--I'm certainly going to ask myself "Should I bring these slides into Google?"

Heck, I may do that with most of the presentations I create from now on, just so I know I have them in some form I can get to from any computer, whether or not it happens to have PowerPoint on it...

More Web Stuff From TechCrunch40

I'm still at the bustlin' TechCrunch40 conference and have seen a bunch more Web-related demos. Some more thoughts:

--In some ways, TripIt is one of the more mundane items that's been shown off so far, but it's also one of the most potentially useful. It's a Web service that lets you e-mail travel e-mail confirmations to it, whereupon it figures out what's in them and builds out a travel plan which you can view, share with others, and otherwise manipulate. And--this is particularly neat--you can export it into Google Calendar. (Minor prediction: In the months to come, Google Calendar will become a sort of universal Web scheduling platform which a lot of third-party services will leverage.) In other words, what it aims to do is save you from having to print out and travel with itinerary e-mails, or manually copy information from them into your calendar.

TripIt is one of the relatively few services on view here that's immediately available to anyone. Unfortunately, the little test drive I just took didn't go well--it couldn't parse enough information from a Hotels.com confirmation I sent it to figure out where and when the reservation was. And it couldn't do anything at all with a confirmation from the travel agency which PC World uses. But I like the idea and am going to keep an eye on this service.

--I first wrote about the "social browser" known as Flock almost two years ago, when its beta launched. It's still in beta, but the Flock folks say it'll reach 1.0 in the fourth quarter of this year. A lot has changed about social interaction on the Web since Flock first went public, and the browser has, too--the demo here involved stuff like Flickr and Facebook integration. What was going on was complicated enough that I didn't catch all of it, but I'm meeting with the company tomorrow and will share some more thoughts after I see this new version close up.

--A little tiny startup called AOL demoed BlueString, a service for uploading photos, videos, and music, and making them into interactive, Web-based shows. Not exactly a new idea, but BlueString has a slick drag-and-drop interface done in Adobe's Flex environment, and a dash of social networking--you can "string" in friends who can then add their own elements to the show you created. BlueString is live already, but I want to try it over a more robust Internet connection than we've got here before coming to any firm conclusions.

TechCrunch40mania!

I'm at TechCrunch40, the conference incarnation of the highest-profile blog on Web 2.0 sites and services. So far, the show--which is at San Francisco's Palace hotel--is pretty much bursting at the seams with people and companies--actually, it's so crowded that I'm sitting on the floor at the back of the room here, hogging one of the few available AC outlets.

Lotsa interesting startups are in the house, although in 2007, most new Web companies seem to be choosing names that don't give you one iota of an idea of what they do. (Examples: Ponoko, Xobni, and Zivity--although I just learned that Xobni is "inbox backwards.")

Also, most of the stuff I've seen so far isn't ready for public consumption--there are lots of services that are still in private beta, or not even ready for a beta of any sort.

A few demos that have impressed (or at least intrigued) me so far:

--Cubic Telecom's MAXRoam is a smart SIM card for wireless phones that can manage multiple phone numbers in multiple countries, so you can bounce from locale to locale and use local numbers, thereby sidestepping nightmarish roaming charges. (I could use this right now--I'm headed to Madrid in a couple of days.)

--I'm not sure if BrightQube is useful, but it sure looks neat. It's an image search engine that puts thousands of tiny thumbnails on your screen and lets you pan around 'em, thereby eliminating the need to page through results.

--Yap had so many troubles with their phone-based demo that the conference organizers invited them back onstage to try again. (Anything that depends on phones working well at conferences of this type is on shaky ground from the get-to, and trying to patch in loudspeakers never seems to help.) Yap's a real-time voice recognition system that lets you use services like instant messaging and Twitter by talking rather than typing, and if it works in real life, it should be worth checking out.

--I don't think I want an iKan, but its inventors deserve some points for creativity, at least. It's a little scanner you sit on a counter in your kitchen; as you use up food items, you scan their UPC symbols, and iKan compiles a shopping list on the fly which it transmits to an online grocery shopping service. iKan says that it's going to announce a partnership with a major grocer soon, and that the scanner will be free at first. (Which sounds like a good idea: They plan to charge $300 eventually, and that sounds steep.)

More notes from the show to come over the next couple of days...

Microsoft's Copy Protection: It's Time to Mend It--Or End It

Say, want to read the next installment of my PCW magazine column--which, like this blog, answers to the name Techlog--a bit early? (It'll be in the November issue, which, in typically confusing magazine style, shows up around the first of October.) Here you go... -------------------------------------------------------------------

So help me, I?m not irrevocably opposed to copy protection. Software developers have a right to get compensated for their work, and they?re entitled to take steps to protect their intellectual property. I get that.

But Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft?s antipiracy techology, is enough to turn anyone into a hardcore copy-protection opponent. And never more so than on August 24th, when a bug on the company?s authentication servers caused WGA to lose its ability to tell a legitimate copy of Windows from an unauthorized copy.

Suddenly, thousands of Microsoft customers got messages informing them that their paid-for software was fake. Worse, WGA punitively disabled their access to features like Windows Vista?s Aero user interface and ReadyBoost accelerator?some of the very items that Microsoft had used to induce buyers to pony up for Vista in the first place.

Nineteen hours later, the company fixed the glitch, and users got their lost features back. All in all, though, the most Microsoft-hating hacker couldn?t have dreamed up a more telling expos? of WGA?s fundamental fragility.

This was hardly the first time the technology had caused headaches for innocent Windows owners. It already had a reputation for mistakenly fingering users as running pirated software when they weren?t: As posts in Microsoft?s own forums show, innocuous activities like adding components to a PC or upgrading its BIOS can lead to trouble.

And when WGA does behave as it?s meant to, it?s still no picnic. Download Windows-related items from Microsoft, and you?ll have to validate your operating system. Download some more, and you?ll need to do it again. The process is especially clunky in Firefox.

Even the way Microsoft markets WGA is broken. Its customers deserve a straightforward acknowledgment that the company is inconveniencing them to protect its profits, not platitudes about WGA existing mostly as a warning system for people who have unwittingly bought counterfeit copies of Windows.

That?s not all they deserve. After the August meltdown, WGA senior product manager Alex Kochis blogged about measures the company is taking to lessen the damage ?should anything like this happen again.? Excuse me? Any copy protection that can accidentally deprive people of features they paid for needs to be rethought from the ground up. Microsoft owes its customers a WGA that?s more predictable and less vindictive. It owes them copy protection that stays out of their face.

Then again, the folks in Redmond could eliminate all of WGA?s problems by simply eliminating the technology altogether. I don?t expect this to happen, but it?s not unthinkable. PC history holds multiple examples of software companies discontinuing the use of copy controls, from Lotus in the 1980s to Intuit after the 2003 tax season.

Every past instance of a product losing its shackles has had two things in common: There were unprotected competitors, and users told the developers behind the copy-protected ones that enough was enough. If I were Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, I?d take note of the fact that there?s no such thing as Mac Genune Advantage or Linux Genuine Advantage?and I?d listen very carefully to what customers have to say about copy protection in Windows.

Last time I checked, I wasn?t Steve Ballmer, but I?m still interested in your thoughts on all this. Drop me a line at harry_mccracken@pcworld.com, with your take on WGA.

Microsoft Office vs. Google Apps: Latest Skirmishes

It may be premature to call the competition between Microsoft Office and Google Apps a war--"spat" might be more accurate as of yet--but whatever it is, it continues to heat up.

Today, Capgemini, the great big global consulting company that works with great big global clients, announced that it'll provide service and support for Google Apps. I chatted with some Capgemini folks about their plans last week, and they said they don't envision big companies dumping Microsoft Office for Apps, but that it can make sense as a complement to Microsoft's wares--especially for companies who have lots of employees who don't have their own PCs (such as workers on factory floors).

I dunno how many of Capgemini's customers will take the plunge, but it's an interesting development--and certainly a sign that Google wants to take the, um, spat to the enterprise front, where so much of Microsoft's profits from Office originate.

And Microsoft has fired back, at least verbally: Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet's All About Microsoft has published a list that Microsoft sent her of ten questions Microsoft says that enterprises should ask themselves before switching to Google Apps Premier Edition. Here's they are.

Many of Microsoft's points are absolutely legitimate. Google Apps isn't a good option for power users (well, at least not as their only suite--but some of the most power-hungry users I know like to use it at least part of the time). It only works when you've got an Internet connection. And it offers no Visual Basic-style programmability or, actually, much in the way of customization features at all.

Others seem like odd issues for Microsoft, of all companies, to bring up, like its criticism of Google for not releasing updates on a known schedule. (Memo to Redmond: Nobody really knowns when you're going to release updates to Office, either.)

Short term, there are at least as many reasons for companies not to use Google Apps--or at least not to bet their business on it--as there are for them to adopt it. Long term, though, there's every reason to think that Office's deskbound foundation is going to feel more and more archaic. And if Google chooses to pour resources into Apps--not a given, although they seem committed to it at the moment--most or all of Microsoft's ten questions will be irrelevant.

In other words, the Microsoft points feel a little like a 2007 edition of the arguments that Wang Labs probably used in the late 1970s to discourage companies from considering PC word processing software such as The Electric Pencil. By the mid-1980s, all the arguments in favor of dedicated word processors had crumbled, and there was nothing the least bit risky about PC-based word processing.

If I were an enterprise Office customer who was considering Apps, I'd ask Google many of the questions Microsoft has so helpfully supplied. But I'd also ask Microsoft why Office, whose roots go back a quarter century, still doesn't have collaboration tools to compare with those in Apps. I'd ask it why Office doesn't have any straightforward way to save documents to the Internet so they're available anywhere. I'd ask it what its plans were for providing a hosted office suite that doesn't require installing a bunch of big fat applications on multiple PCs.

I've said before that I can't tell if Google is committed to Apps, or whether it's simply yanking Microsoft's chain. (We've seen evidence lately that Google isn't above giving up on unsuccessful products even when it causes problems for people who have given it money.) But I have no doubt that Apps represents the future of office-productivity software. Some Web-hosted suite is going to cut dramatically into Office's market share over the next few years...though I'm entirely prepared to believe that it might be a Web-hosted suite from Microsoft that does the job.

Meanwhile, here's a question for you:

Next Year's iPods

A week ago, everyone was wondering what the new iPods would be like--or even making confident assertions about them, many of which turned out to be wrong. Now we know everything. And it's not too early to wonder what's next.

So little is known about the iPod development process that any speculation about it is by its very nature really speculative. But it's likely that the round of iPods that Apple is shipping now represent the fruits--pun unavoidable--of a transitional time.

Rumor has it that the iPod team didn't know about the iPhone until Steve Jobs unveiled it in January. The new iPod Nano and iPod Classic, with their spruced-up interfaces and slicker industrial design, probably reflect the last work done by the iPod team in the pre-iPhone era-they were supposed to be the future of the iPod's interface until the iPhone leapfrogged them. And the multitouch-and-Wi-Fi-equipped iPod Touch is the first true post-iPhone iPod--but one that's so similar to the iPhone that it may well have been a rush project.

I'm not sure when significantly new iPods will show up--judging from Apple's past practices, it could be just a few months, or a lot longer--but they'll likely be the first ones that truly incorporate ideas and technologies from the iPhone into all-new iPods. And while I've said I've learned not to make Apple predictions, I'm still willing to make educated guesses about what might be in the offing.

First of all, I think that the name "iPod Classic" is more than a convenient way to clarify which iPod you're talking about when you talk about the classic, full-sized model: I think it's a tipoff that this version, in the form we've known it, is headed for retirement in favor of something substantially different. The substantially-different thing that would make sense would be an iPod that melded the Touch and the Classic into one model with the best of both: The multi-touch interface and a whoppin' big hard drive. The logical move would be to retire the click wheel and give this model a screen that spans the entire face of the player.

When you're talking about iPods that might be, it's a tradition to show 'em--so here's my pathetically crude mockup of what...well, let's call it the iPod Touch Second Generation...might look like:

The first-generation iPod Touch is a little too obviously a repurposed iPhone, and it's similar in dimensions to the Classic; it would make sense to decisively merge these models into one design that has its own unique look. But the Touch is a tad thinner than the classic, and we know that Steve Jobs really likes being able to tell the world that a new iPod is thinner than its predecessor. That might be tough if the Touch 2G only was available in a hard-drive version: There may be a limit to how thin an iPod with rotating media and a touch screen can be.

So perhaps the Touch 2G will come in a skinny version with flash memory--32GB might be doable, but if not, 16GB--and a slightly more zaftig one with a 160GB hard drive.

Would all Touch 2G models run the iPhone's version of OS X and come with Wi-Fi? Probably--I think that Apple is really excited about the potential of iPods that can talk to the iTunes Store without a computer being involved. Once you've done that, you'd probably give all of them Safari and an on-screen keyboard, too.

Okay, that's one potential future for the full-sized iPod. How about the Nano? The new one is remarkably cute, and the 2-inch screen is surprisingly watchable. But if you're killing the iconic click wheel from the iconic full-sized iPod, why not nuke it from the Nano, too, and release a tiny iPod with the largest screen possible? One that looked like this crude mockup of what I'm calling the iPod Nano Touch:

This design would require a touch-screen interface of some sort, but for reasons of cost, size, and complexity, I'm thinking it wouldn't be the iPhone's full-blown OS X/multitouch/Internet-enabled platform. We'd get a simple single-touch interface, with no compatibility with the larger iPhones, and no Wi-Fi. It'd still rely on synching with a computer to get music and video. We might, however, get a capacity bump--16GB sounds plausible and pleasing.

One possible stumbling block: The new Nano is .6.5 \mm thick, a millimeter svelter than the last-generation Nano. Apple might not want to come out with a thicker Nano, and it might be a challenge to cram a touchscreen of any sort into a player that's at most 6.5mm deep. We'll see.

Okay, I'm done guessing. I predict that some of the theories I detail above will at least sort of come true, sooner or later, and that I'm utterly wrong about other things. How's that for a vague conclusion? Once the first round of 2008 iPods comes out, I'll try to remember to grade this post's musings, for better or for worse...

Office 2.0: Booming!

I'm spending most of my Thursday and Friday at Office 2.0, a conference here in San Francisco on the future of Web-based productivity.

Last year's show was a bustling success. This one puts that one to shame, with most of both days filled with multiple tracks of panel discussions and demos, mostly involving dozens of very small companies doing very interesting things.

Office 2.0 is the right show in the right place at the right time: There haven't been so many new productivity tools out there since the golden age of PC software back in the 1980s. How many of these companies will make it is anyone's guess--not all of them have figured out how to make money--but I admire their creativity, and we'll cover a bunch of their wares in various places around PCW.

This morning, conference organizer Ismael Ghalimi, who says he's sworn off using desktop software except for Apple's iWork, explained how the conference was organized and run almost entirely without paper. (The one exception: Some sponsors paid their fees with paper checks.) Ghalimi uses Web-based services like Zoho, ThinkFree, and SmartSheet to plan and run the show.

As part of the conference's paper-free initiative, the admission price included an iPhone: Instead of getting a printed schedule and other dead-tree materials, we all have access to a Web-based iPhone app developed by Etelos. (Journalists like me, who get free press passes, don't get the phone; I brought PCW's iPhone with me.) The app is pretty slick, but it does point out a major issue with phone-based productivity tools: Most of the people at the conference probably already had Internet-connected phones, but any Web-based applications that would have worked on all of them would have been pretty crude.

You know this stuff is pretty immature when the conference has to provide pricey new phones in order to avoid handing out cheap paper schedules. (And honestly, while I admire Ghalimi's passion, I kinda think a pocket-sized printed agenda would have been handy in ways no electronic one could be.)

At the moment, Ghalimi is talking about his plans for next year's conference--which he says involve holding a competition to design a cheap and useful mobile device which they can distribute to all conference attendees, since he says that no current device (including the iPhone) really fits the bill...

Fifteen Random Thoughts About the New iPods

Whenever I attend an Apple product launch, I know the drill: By the end of the day, I'll have a head full of random thoughts and questions regarding the stuff that was unveiled. As usual, I'll document 'em here for posterity.

First, though, a few plugs for other iPod-related content here on PC World--all of it courtesy of Melissa Perenson, our senior products editor. Here's Melissa's video report on the new 'Pods. Here's a slideshow she put together. And here are her thoughts on today's news.

Now for my iPod-related brain dump:

They really are beautiful. You won't see this until you see the new iPod lineup in person, but the industrial design is probably the best that Apple or anyone else in consumer electronics has ever done--they just look great. Especially the Nano: The change in dimensions not only accommodates the larger screen, but somehow makes the player positively endearing. Funny but true: There's one model called the iPod Touch, but the metal finishes on the Classic and Nano are the ones that make those two players feel as good as they look.

I'm reserving judgment on the new user interface. I've always liked the streamlned minimalism of the iPod UI. The new one as seen on the Nano and Classic is a departure, with a fair amount of graphical frippery--like cover art floating behind menus--that serves no great purpose. I'm not saying it's a mistake, but I'd want to live with it awhile before declaring it an improvement on the old one.

Bye Bye, Classic? Finally, the iPod that we think of when we think of iPods has a name--it's the Classic. That doesn't seem like a name you'd give a product you expected to sell forever--Coca-Cola Classic notwithstanding. I kinda wonder if Apple now thinks of the Touch as the flagship iPod, and if it won't be long until the Classic gives way to a Touch with a big honkin' hard drive or, conceivably, a ton of flash RAM.

A hundred and sixty gigs! For now, though, the high-end Classic's 160GB of space is pretty darn startling. (Normally at Apple events, I feel like I'm surrounded by people who'll ooh and aah at the most mundane of spec bumps; when Jobs unleashed this one, I was oohing and aahing with the best of 'em.) I wonder how many people will buy this model, and what percentage of them will immediately fill up them up?

Rotating storage lives! The 160GB Classic certainly shows there's still a place for hard disks inside iPods--if Apple were to put 160GB of flash storage inside an iPod, it would have to charge several thousand dollars for it. I suspect, though, that by Fall 2008. most iPods will be solid-state, with one or two disk-based models left in the lineup.

Will the Touch succeed? Until now, there's been a logical progression of iPod models, from small, low-capacity, and cheap (Shuffle) to big, high-capacity, and relatively pricey (full-sized iPod). The Touch ends that clarity by being large, low-capacity, and relatively pricey. Will people spend $399 for an iPod that won't hold all their music? I'm not sure.

Is the Touch really a computer? I think Apple's being pretty savvy selling it as a media player and downplaying the fact it contains Safari--which means it can do just about anything you can do on the Web. (I'm thinking of the fact that devices like Sony's Mylo, which are in some ways similar to the Touch but sold on the strength of their computing and communications features, never seem to go anywhere.) However it's marketed, the Touch is the first phone-less iPod that can do a heckuva lot of things that have nothing to do with enjoying entertainment, and you gotta think that Apple is quietly but intentionally expanding the iPod's mission with this device.

What, no multi-touch iPod I can put all my music on? The most important product Apple didn't announce today--and the iPod I and a lot of other people want--is a model equipped with a big touchscreen and at least 80GB of storage apace. I'm not entirely sure why one didn't show up--maybe it's hard to make one as thin as Mr. Jobs likes his music players--but it seems a safe bet that we'll get one within the next year, if not a lot sooner.

Will anyone turn the Touch into a Wi-Fi VoIP iPhone? Technically, it's probably doable without a huge amount of effort--you can make Skype calls on an iPhone, and there are plug-in microphones for other iPods. I'm sure someone will try, but I can't figure out whether Apple will consider it a laudable use of its device or a nefarious threat to iPhone sales.

When will we be able to download video on an iPod? The iTunes store you can get to from the Touch and iPhone is the iTunes Music Store. Movies and TV would eat up a lot more Wi-Fi bandwidth, but we'll presumably see them at some point.

Why no music sharing a la the Zune? iPod Touches (or is that iPods Touch?) apparently can't use their Wi-Fi connections to talk to each other. I'll bet Apple would never introduce a sharing feature as ridden by DRM-related gotchas as the Zune's "squarting," but I'm still curious whether it's trying to figure out a way to make sharing make sense.

Prediction winners and losers. Think Secret correctly predicted we'd get a touch-screen iPod (although it said it would likely have a hard drive) and nailed the new Nano. Not perfect, but not bad. VNUnet, however, flopped with its confident-sounding piece on iPods with HD radio. Pure fantasy, at least for now.

Starbucks' cup runneth over. I'm not a great audience for an extended discussion of the Wonders of Starbucks--I drink maybe one cup of coffee every two years--but I'll bet I'm not the only person in the audience who thought that Chairman Howard Schultz's presentation was interminable. (Especially given that Mr. Jobs himself kinda rushed through some pretty interesting stuff, like the new iPod user interface.) On the bright side, Schultz was a polished enough presenter to hold his own during a Jobs keynote, which you can't say about most of the other execs who manage to get on stage at these events. (Cue flashback to the debut of Motorola's ROKR phone.)

What's really behind the Starbucks-Apple partnership? The coffee kingpins are going to spend years--and, presumably, millions and millions of dollars--setting up the technology they need to let customers spend 99 cents to download the song they're listening to. You gotta think that there's a master strategy behind it all that's not apparent yet. (More than one person I talked to wondered why you won't be able to use an iPod to pay for your latte: Maybe you will someday.)

No John, No Paul, No George, No Ringo. This was approximately the 6,172nd Apple event preceded by pundits confidently predicting it would involve the announcement that Beatles music would be available for download. Jobs seemed to taunt us, even--his demos involved both solo Lennon and solo McCartney at various points. I was willing to believe that Paul was waiting in the wings at the Moscone Center up to the moment that Jobs bid us all farewell. But the iTunes Store remains Fab Fourless.

Those are my iPod-related thoughts and questions at the moment. Got any answers, rejoinders, or musings of your own?

Tuesday Apple Event: Live Chat

I'm here at Moscone Center in San Francisco at Apple's product launch, and will be reporting in the chat room below on what we learn, as we learn it. (The room is hovering at max capacity; if you can't get it, wait a bit and try again--someone may have wandered off in the interim...)

UPDATE: The chat is over, so I've closed the room--thanks to everyone who showed up and made the event a hit. (We were too successful: We maxed out Meebo's 80-persona capacity!)

Palm's Foleo is DBA (Dead Before Arrival)

Breaking news from Palm: It's decided to kill Foleo, the not-quite-a-notebook, not-quite-a-handheld device that Palm founder Jeff Hawkins unveiled back at the Wall Street Journal's D conference in May. Palm CEO Ed Colligan just blogged the news, saying that the company wants to focus on its next-generation platform for smartphones, and that it still plans to release a "Foleo II" at some unspecified date. But Foleo I--the device which Hawkins called the most exciting product he'd ever worked on--will never see the light of day.

On one level, the move makes perfect sense. Colligan's absolutely right that Palm should focus on getting the future of its phones right. And Foleo had about the worst pre-release reception I can remember any product getting, ever--the conventional wisdom instantly became that it was an unimpressive product aimed at a market that doesn't exist. (I felt completely alone when I said that I wanted to try one before reaching any conclusions, and that there might eventually be a market for devices kinda-sorta like the Foleo.) The bottom line was that Foleo was likely to be a distraction at a time when Palm can't afford to be distracted--and probably a LifeDrive-like flop, too.

But on another level, it's just dumbfounding to see Palm pull the plug on Foleo at this point. It spent millions of dollars developing it. It's spent three months promoting it as a breakthrough. It was insisting a little over a week ago that the product was about to ship.

My mind's reeling with questions. Has there ever been another example of a product this high-profile failing to show up? (Probably--Apple's Rhapsody leaps to mind--but I can't think of any in the past decade or so.) How embarrassing is it for Palm to can it just when people were wondering when it would show up in stores? How could the company not have made this decision from the get-go, before the world even knew it was working on something called a Foleo? Couldn't it tell that the initial reception for the Foleo was likely to be less than glowing?

And hey, just what are the chances that the "Foleo II" mentioned in Colligan's blog post will ever turn into an actual product? The name's damaged goods, and if Palm were to pre-announce it, nobody would believe it until it showed up on store shelves.

As I've blogged before, I've been a fan of Palm products since before the time when the PalmPilot got its name. I'm rooting for the company to come out with cool stuff that helps it flourish for years to come, and there are millions and millions of Palm devotees out there who feel the same way. But lordy, do we need to hear some truly exciting news out of this company.

The upcoming phone that will apparently be called the Centro doesn't seem to be that news. At this point, everything's riding on the next-generation phone platform--which has already been delayed into 2008 after the company said the first phones would be available this year.

In Colligan's post today, he speaks of that next-generation platform:

"We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment."

If you're a Palm admirer past or present, your instinct will be to hope that the new platform, whenever it shows up, is worthy of what Colligan is saying today about the new platform. I think it's possible it will be. And if it is, every indignity the company has suffered in recent years could turn into a distant memory pretty quickly.

So unlike a lot of pundits, I'm not declaring that Palm is toast. But after the short, unhappy, much-hyped reign of Foleo I, it's safe to say that this company's going to have to work really, really hard to rebuild its credibility...