Exaggerated Reports of Office's Death

From all quarters you can hear the pronouncements of the death of Microsoft Office. Steve Gillmor insisted that Office is dead in a Robert Scoble. The subject also came up on Gmail as a replacement for Outlook, for example. I talk to more and more people for whom Gmail is their only email client. Online word processors are also cropping up, like Zoho Writer. Dan Bricklin (who developed VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet) has produced a AJAX-based tools are definitely cool, they also are incomplete. I've played with Writely and I like it, but it doesn't help me if I need to incorporate something as simple as a table or a graphic. Mail merge? Forget it. Further, these tools aren't interrelated. I can't bring data from a spreadsheet into a presentation and have it automatically update when I make a change to the spreadsheet. This probably won't always be the case, but it is for now, and likely for a while. But the biggest obstacle to adoption of these is the CIO. Most Office installations aren't attributed to sole practitioners like me. They're site licenses bought by businesses large and small. Each of these businesses has a security-conscious IT manager who is concerned about putting the company's intellectual assets at risk. The notion of creating sensitive internal documents on a web-based services will undoubtedly send tremors of terror along the spines of these already-paranoid executives. If the IT staff doesn't seem like an obstacle, consider the employees who use Office. Not the high-tech, early adopting, gadget loving employees, but everyone else. I worked with a company recently where there was damn near a revolt over switching the staff from WordPerfect to Word. People threatened to quit. Others were threatened with termination if they continued to resist. It was ugly. Change is hard and slow. Finally, let's not forget that Microsoft has already taken a few tiny steps into this space with its Shel Holtz is principal of a shel of my former self