Randall Stross has an interesting piece in The New York Times about the possible effects on Office of Microsoft’s latest purchase.
He refers to a slide sent to Microsoft investors to explain the LinkedIn purchase:
“A professional’s profile everywhere
Today, there is no one source of truth for an individual profile – the data is scattered across many endpoints often with outdated or incomplete information. In the future, a professional’s profile will be unified and the right data at the right time will surface in an app, whether Outlook, Skype, Office or elsewhere.“
Source: Slide 13 of presentation with “Microsoft and LinkedIn Conference Call” 13 June 2016.
We’ve been closely watching and writing about Microsoft Office for 20 years and we’ve heard this all before. ‘Right data at the right time’ is always a promise from Microsoft. A dream of almost magical software that will somehow show what you need and nothing you don’t. Since no-one can do that reliably for spam email, it’s hard to see how it’ll happen in other areas.
Well over 15 years ago we listened to Microsoft boast about a ‘virtual assistant’ in Outlook that would manage information and tasks automatically. It was coming ‘very soon’ … and we’re still waiting.
Microsoft’s vision is always conveniently narrow. It assumes a person is working on a single task or project with other people who have the same or similar levels of involvement. In practice we all work on multiple tasks at the same time and the people we work with have differing levels of involvement and interest in the project.
Microsoft is right, we all have information spread across various locations. Bringing it together for a single task can be difficult, but it’s hard to see that LinkedIn as part of an all Microsoft system will help. The whole thing looks like typical hype and management speak to placate investors shocked at the hefty price tag and struggling to see the value.
Mr Stross raises the other problem with modern computing – interruption. The idea of working on a Word document and being interrupted by people from your LinkedIn profile will horrify everyone except those in the Microsoft Reality Bubble™.
