KnowledgeForward

I just got back from a business trip last night to find that a storm had hit.  My house is fine, but my e-mail inbox is wrecked.  The storm was caused by a document recently published by the Burton Group called “What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications”.  A small minority of the comments address technical issues with the document, but the vast majority are mudslinging that call everything from our objectivity to our parental heritage into question.

This document was published in the Collaboration and Content Strategies service at Burton Group.  I am the manager of that service and the analysts (Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly) that wrote the document are in CCS.  I stand behind the document, Guy and Peter, and Burton Group fully. 

In seeing this reaction to the document I am not entirely surprised.  My blog entry from September called Microsoft Loses Open XML Vote noted that much of the furor about the OOXML vs. ODF battle was not based on technical merit, but politics and techno-religion. That’s how it seems to have played out too.  It seems the majority of the negative comments in the blogosphere were written by people that haven’t read the report and are responding to a simple summary that they read somewhere.  Please folks - this report is free and available on the Burton Group website under “Free Research”. 

Microsoft had nothing to do with this document other than providing information and vendor review just like IBM, Sun, and others did.  If Microsoft was trying to buy or influence the writing of this document they would have to be pretty annoyed at how balanced it is.  Here is the entire conclusion of the document.  Does this sound like the fiery rhetoric of someone preaching for Microsoft?

The OpenDocument Format (ODF)/Office Open XML (OOXML) debate is part of a significant phase in the evolution of productivity application, with the shift to Extensible Markup Language (XML) file formats displacing traditional binary and proprietary file formats. The stakes are huge, with compelling new opportunities for content management, as well as both opportunities and challenges for software vendors. Organizations will gain important benefits by exploiting opportunities to improve information management and reduce vendor dependencies by shifting to XML file formats.

The articles on this debate like to pick up phrases from within the 37 page document or pro-OOXML recommendations (stripped of nuance of course), but they are doing a disservice to their readers.  Here’s the beginning of the analysis section.  The full doc has a lot more nuance and detail, but this gives the opening “attack”.  Is this a blustery, one-sided viewpoint? 

The recent industry debate about OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) often comes down to the blunt question, “Which one will lead?” There are three answers. The first answer is, “It depends on who you are.” {description of applicability by industry given here … The second answer is, “Within the larger market, OOXML will lead,” for three reasons {the three reasons are detailed here} … The third answer is, “In the long run, perhaps neither.” {description of how OOXML and ODF may both be irrelevent as documents become more hypertext oriented}

Someone attacking our vendor independence pointed out a blog post I wrote about our SharePoint workshops.  This person seemed to believe that if we do workshops on SharePoint strategy we profit from SharePoint’s popularity and would therefore sell our soul to perpetuate it.  This isn’t a direct quote - this person was much less eloquent.  This assertion is flatly wrong.  Our workshop points out the flaws of SharePoint as well as the better parts.  It goes through the offerings of competing products from IBM, Oracle, Google, and more and points out where those products are better and where they are worse.  It points out that organizations have been unsuccessful with SharePoint and that if you fit the same profile, you might be better off with something else from another vendor.  If someone leaves that workshop deciding SharePoint isn’t for them, fine - I don’t lose a penny since we don’t do implementation and we offer the same objective advice about whatever other product they choose too.  And if SharePoint starts losing out in popularity to something like IBM’s Quickr/Connections products, then expect to see an IBM workshop from us that points out strategies, high points, and pitfalls there too. 

I have no trouble attacking SharePoint when it’s warranted.  One of the most popular documents I wrote when I was at Meta Group was called “Sharepoint: Why Not”. If anything, I’ve found Burton Group’s independence to be even higher.  We will not write a vendor document for hire (even for the vendor’s own internal use) or accept any money for a document we are writing.  We do present at vendor’s conferences (we are presenting at Lotusphere next week for example) and we do webinars and other events, but we give the same presentation we would at our own Catalyst conference. 

As stated by our vendor independence policy more than 80% of our customers are enterprise customers.  There are no catches hidden there (our split by revenue is approximately the same, we don’t count Microsoft as an enterprise customer, etc.).  We play to our base, and our base is large organizations and enterprises, not vendors. 

For more information, your first resource should be the document itself.  Go to the source and let us know where you agree or disagree.  If you want a summary of resources on the technologies themselves rather than the debate (good for you!) jump to the end of the report  and it links to information on the relevant standards.

• The document itself can be found here under CCS.
• Peter O’Kelly postings here and here
• Posting on our service blog by Guy Creese here

Chris Saad, writing in the Particls blog (quoting Dallas J Clark), pointed out a great offer I hadn’t seen - a full suite of high-end Microsoft end user software for free!  Well, nothing’s for free of course.  You just have to hand over some attention data. 

Here’s how Dallas summarizes the deal

What do you get?

• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit and 64-bit DVD)
• Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
• Microsoft Money Plus Premium
• Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008
• Microsoft Streets and Trips 2008

Requirements?

• First off, you have to be an American resident and over the age of 18 years.
• You must own the computer you will be using.
• You are required to fill out a survey at the start, and then every 2 weeks.
• The automated program is offered to Windows Vista and Windows XP customers only.
• The survey feedback program applies to all versions of Windows.
• Microsoft, comScore, and MarketTools employees are not eligible to participate.

I did a little poking around on this (the homepage is here) and I’m not sure they are still offering all that software.  Surprisingly, the FAQ doesn’t answer the simple questions “Why would I do this?” and “What do I get out of it?”.  Granted, I do donate my time to charitable causes from time to time, but usually not to corporations that make more than $10 billion in profit each year.  That’s right, I draw the line at $10 billion.

Anyways, the FAQ does answer:

What will Microsoft provide?
We will provide to you the software and necessary licensing to accomplish the data collection. Specifically Microsoft will provide you with:

• All software, including documentation, required to gather data regarding your home computer use.
• In consideration of your participation, a license covering the software provided, under the terms and conditions that accompany that software. Please note, except as expressly licensed to you in those Licenses, Microsoft retains all right, title, and interest in and to the Microsoft software provided under the Windows Feedback Program.

It sounds to me like they are giving you the software that does the data gathering, not Vista and Office itself.

Of course, if they do actually give you thousands of dollars in free software for your participation this is as much a test of how much you trust Microsoft as it is an assessment of what your attention data is worth.  Still, the response rate will be interesting to see how people assess the value they place on their attention, the value they place on Vista and Office, and the trust they have in Microsoft.

I’ve become convinced that one of the most significant attentional technologies that software vendors could incorporate to accommodate interruptions is what I’d call placeholding.  Since “bookmarking” has come to mean pointers to specific entries rather than points anywhere within an entry I prefer the word “placeholding”.

Why do applications that allow you to move around large pieces of content (Microsoft Word and Excel, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox) always assume you want to start at the beginning when opening a document instead of where it was the last time you looked at it?  More than half the time I think I would want it opened to where I left off when I last closed it.  And if I didn’t it’s easy enough to hit ctrl-home to get to the top whereas it is impossible to start at the top and hit a key to get to where you left off.  At a minimum it could be a preference checkbox.  This placeholding includes where the cursor was as well as what state various toggle buttons and selections were at (such as that I was in boldface, red text, the highlighter was yellow, and I had just selected a region). 

There are some technical issues to be worked around here.  Sometimes you don’t want to modify the file - a separate placeholder file, like a browser’s bookmark file could accommodate this issue.  Sometimes there are multiple users on a PC or files get shared - storing user name along with the place like some cookies do could fix that.  I don’t think the technical issues are a stopping point.  We tolerate other actions that don’t guess what we want to do correctly 100% of the time that have a lot less benefit.

In “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work”, a paper by Gloria Mark, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris from the University of California, Irvine, they talk about technology requirements for supporting for fragmented work:

Two decades ago Bannon et al. suggested a set of
requirements for information technology to support
multitasking including providing fast task-switching and the
easy retrieval of mental context. Our work expands these
requirements for multi-tasking. We suggest three main
directions for supporting multi-tasking behavior: 1)
interruptions ideally should match the current working sphere
in order to provide benefits instead of disruptions, 2) one
should be able to easily and seamlessly switch between tasks,
and 3) interrupted tasks should be easily recoverable by
preserving the state of the task when it was interrupted and
by providing cues for reorienting to the task.

It’s this third design criteria that I’m describing here - being able to preserve the state of an application or a set of applications. 

But placeholding doesn’t seem to be high on request lists for new features, so vendors haven’t paid a lot of attention.  In the meantime I’ve gotten into the habit of doing a crude workaround while reviewing large Word documents where I place manual bookmarks within documents I’m reading by typing “[bookmark]” in long documents and saving a new local version.

While there is some minor time benefit to having placeholding, I believe the primary benefit is psychological.  A standard work pattern for information workers is that during a day they become deeply nested in what they are doing.  Multiple browser windows, a spreadsheet or two, a custom app, and a document may all be open to various palaces and the user becomes a juggler keeping all the balls circulating in their mind.  A system crash is the most extreme event that makes one realize how much they were juggling as they attempt to recreate their state upon rebooting.  Keeping these placeholders in memory hinders task-switching and increases the stress the user feels when being interrupted (or anticipates the potential of interruption).  Knowing that places are being held would not eliminate the need to retain mental context, but would reduce it by removing the burden to remember all the documents opened and places within those documents.  I hope that vendors do additional research into how users react to placeholding from an attention management, interruption science, and usability point of view. 

I read an interesting entry on the Gilbane Technology CTO blog called “XML and Office 2.0“. I recommend it as a good posting about all the “new web” stuff being applied to Office, but I thought it went a bit far in a few areas.

I posted the following response:

You’re right about the unbridled enthusiasm making this possible - wiki versions of Office apps are really scratching an itch that has been there for a long time. I don’t buy that it is now possible due to new technologies though - AJAX and RSS are actually not that new. It’s more due to the emergence and acceptance of wikis as a concept and rich internet application programming models.

Offline and disconnected usage is a wrench in the works here. I don’t want to have to wait until internet access is widely and cheaply available on planes just to work on a report while flying. And a mobile lifestyle leads to an occasionally connected lifestyle as well.

BTW - I have a number of problems with the “Office 2.0″ moniker, not least being that we have already had Office 3.0 (it came out in August of 1992: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office). The “2.0″ tag looks funny when applied to versioned software.