I am a member of a few groups of professional writers and editors, and have found, to my amazement, that many of these people seriously dislike Word 2007. This came as a shock to me, because within two days of starting to work with it myself, I loved it and my own productivity sky-rocketed.
This has led me on a quest to understand. How am I, and the others who enjoy Word 2007, different from those who detest the new format and have experienced a decline in their productivity?
Is Web 2.0 literacy the key? Once there was a gulf between those with a home computer, an internet connection and email, and those without. That gulf may now be between computer people who have adapted to Web 2.0 and those who have not.
Corporate environments tend to lock down internet access so their workers cannot use applications like Facebook and Twitter in work time. I wonder; have they inadvertently done themselves a disservice? In addition, people who work on computers all day – apart from computer enthusiasts – may be disinclined to go home and sit on Facebook all night. I am suspecting that there has been a serious paradigm shift out there in "user land" that professional and corporate IT people have been locked away from and haven't really spotted.
I'm not sure what it really is or really entails and I doubt anyone does. It is all moving far too fast for that. But it is a rollercoaster I would rather jump on than miss.
So back to Microsoft. My observation is that Microsoft may have FOLLOWED this Web 2.0 lead. They have observed what is happening with Web 2.0, and taken the lead amongst desktop software systems in shifting themselves into this new world. I know that many people do like Office 2007, and I am wondering of Web 2.0 literacy is the key.
Windows Live is a good example of Microsoft's attempts to enter the Web 2.0 world. When they first devised Windows Live, it was effectively an online document collaboration tool; not a huge shift from the Microsoft core business, just an extension of it. Over time it has evolved into something that looks like it is trying to compete with Facebook. Again, Microsoft seems to be following, not leading.
Web 2.0 affects more than just Microsoft. It is changing the entire web development industry. I bought a copy of DreamWeaver to create my own web pages, and found it very heavy going. At about that time, I discovered Weebly, BlinkWeb and Google Blogger. My Dreamweaver has sat, unloved and un-mastered on my desktop ever since. The free drag and drop technologies do enough to satisfy my sole trader, home business needs. How will this impact on web development professionals, and on the high level web development tools? Will they drift into obscurity? It won't take long – maybe a year or two to get the answer to that question. Will Adobe bring out the Rolls Royce of on-line web development tools? Now that would be interesting!
The Web 2.0 revolution has also affected publishing. I found my publisher was not promoting my books into the global marketplace as they had promised, so I have self-published using Web 2.0 resources. Others have been unable to get published at all, and so have self-published, to find themselves with best sellers on their hands and conventional publishers offering them million-dollar contacts. Print-on-demand technology is revolutionising publishing as we speak. I can supply my book as a PDF file to a printer who can cost effectively print and despatch a single copy; no more huge print runs resulting in volumes of remaindered stock.
What else is being radically changed as Web 2.0 developers get better and better at what they do, and are enabling ordinary users to do more and more of what they once had to pay professionals to do?
I am writing this using the Blog template in Word 2007 and will hit a button in Word to save it to my Google blog. From there it will distribute itself across a range of other sites with no human intervention. Now how sweet is that?
