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Covert Office reporting

If you’re not allowed to hear Steve Ballmer speak, just stand outside the door.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO had something to say about the future of Microsoft Office at the ‘Business Intelligence’ conference over the weekend.

None of it is a real surprise to anyone who reads Office Watch:



  • Office will migrate to a software plus service model.
    In fact that’s already started though it’ll have to be a lot better than the lame and expensive ‘Office Live’ offering to be of interest. Our continuing series on using Google Docs and Spreadsheets with MS Office shows how you can do that now while Microsoft catches up.

  • Improvements based on the Office 2007 ribbon
    Again no surprise, once Microsoft feels enough people have embraced the new interface you can expect they’ll build on that. The first hurdle is moving users away from the limitations of the old toolbars – familiar and comfortable as they might be.

  • Office as part of the business workflow
    This is the move we’ve seen for many years. Instead of Microsoft Office as a standalone program, Microsoft want to link it to server systems (also from Microsoft) to provide communications, sharing and network control.

Kudos to Todd Bishop at the Seattle P-I for all this info. For reasons passing understanding, the media was prevented from attending Mr Ballmer’s address. I can’t imagine why that was done; it’s not as if anything said was ground-breaking. Having been denied entry, Todd demonstrated admirable ‘covert’ skills by the simple expedient of standing outside the door and taking notes.

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