Office vs. Web apps: Breaking the 0-0 tie

The story so far: We're in the initial phase of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview, a period of private and public testing that could last for the better part of a year. So far, the biggest complaint we're seeing emerge is that so little is changing, that it's becoming more difficult for Microsoft to make the value proposition for why businesses and individuals should upgrade from Office 2007 or even 2003. In the absence of viable, existing reasons why the new Office will be better than the old one, a couple of Microsoft employees launched a Web site this week, asking people to come up with their own reasons and vote up each other's best responses.

Right now, the number one suggestion users have for "making Office better" is the restoration of an old feature that existed in Office XP. The #3 suggestion for Word: Give users the option to bring back the Office 2003 menu bar. (You can just hear Carmi Levy cheering that suggestion.) So to recap, from both Microsoft and its users, nothing new yet, but plenty of pleas to bring back old stuff that was just fine.

From the other side of the fence, we're hearing some vocal complaints. The monolithic nature of PC applications such as Office, the argument goes, runs counter to the modern and evolved state of app development. Office is expensive, it's cumbersome, and it's not all that mobile. And it tends to force data to be formatted and archived using protocols that are either owned by someone or subject to unanticipated change, or both. The Web apps model would appear to solve these problems. Web apps are nimbler, you can run them anywhere there's a (modern) browser, and all the changes are managed on the back end without involving you, the user.

The Web app is the future, the other camp chants; the Web is the platform. And in the future, your data will move, your applications will evolve, and your work will progress at the speed of the Web.

Oh, really? Let's hoist our old windsocks for a moment and see just how fast that is.

The principal channel that a Web application platform needs to maintain communications between server and client is under suspicion from interest groups for what they claim could be its potential use by governments in surveillance activities. The most oft-heard excuse from Web developers regarding why they don't adopt new standards is because users won't dump the old browser. And the most oft-heard excuse from users as to why they don't dump the old browser is because their businesses have yet to hear a compelling case for why they should adopt new standards. Microsoft won't terminate IE6 support until 2014; and it may take another three years for the government study of the effects of that termination to be completed.

Meanwhile, the reason why Web standards bodies can't adopt new standards is because their members can't reach an agreement over whether a "standard" is the technology most openly shared or the one most overtly used. And in the wake of the latest disagreement over Web video standards, Google -- the owner of YouTube, the Web's largest proprietor of Flash video -- purchased On2, the company behind the standard that Google's own engineer slapped down in the W3C.

Google's incentive to make an On2-based codec the standard upon which all Web video is based, and in so doing upend YouTube's central platform, appears to be on a level with Microsoft's incentive to make HTTP-NG the next secure transport layer for the Web, right after it hired away its principal creator in 1999. If you check the guy's Web page, you'll see that as of 2006, he's still hard at work on it.

The reasons why there cannot be a "revolution" in Web applications, at least not yet, are clear and threefold: One, there is a measurable drought of new ideas and innovation as to what a Web application should be. When one is perceived to improve, it's usually because it looks and works more like Office 2003. At the period in Web apps' history when we should be inventing the rocket that takes them to the moon, their principal designers are stuck reinventing the wheel.

Two, no one has created the business model for a sustainable Web apps market. Let's face it: Today's Internet is besieged by the failure of any kind of business model to sustain an industry, beyond simply sustaining Google. Now, certainly Google has reason to feel it can produce a workable platform and profit from it. But to date, Google's success has been attained from the sweat and toil of online publishers who blithely feed it the content it needs to hang its shingle and sell advertising. So all the evidence we have at our disposal points to Google, this single competitive entity upon which more and more of the non-Microsoft development world is pinning its hopes, building a Web applications industry around the ideal that we're all standing ready to take a break, and we'll be right back after this important message.

The problem with all commercial publishing on the Web today is that it does not know how to generate an audience. So it produces features and headlines and functions that cater to the least common denominator, that shout as loud as they can but say little of substance. Once in a great while, they can reel in a big fish and turn a profit for the day, but not every day. Is this really the business model you want extended to the realm of Web applications?

Or perhaps you prefer the alternative, the walled-garden model of utopia, where There's An App For That* (*void where prohibited). To borrow a phrase from Dr. Phil, "How's that workin' for ya?"

Three -- and I mean this in all sincerity -- what platform? In recent years, the development of an infrastructure for Web-based functionality and communication has been the one element of the IT industry where there's been any healthy progress, where there's still activity, where ideas are truly flourishing. There's RESTful architecture, persistent objects for AJAX, dynamic languages -- there's real and good work going on here, from both the open source and commercial camps.

But just like Lotus Symphony nearly sunk the Macintosh in its initial months, the platform needs a killer app, not a killing app. And so far, the need to tie everything back to the browser, to the big window with the close box and the menu bar, to 1984...is holding everybody back.

If Microsoft Office appears to be sinking under the weight of old ideas, its would-be successor doesn't exactly appear to be treading water. We lack a viable business model, we lack cohesion in our standards efforts, and we lack a sense of direction, mainly due to the stark absence of new ideas, and one inspiring vision to make those ideas flourish. Maybe one will turn up on MakeOfficeBetter.com, though I'm not betting money on it. However, I will say this for certain: The one company that has always consistently flourished and prospered in the absence of new ideas, is Microsoft.

So unless you've got some brilliant plan, 2014 will be a lot like 1984.