Words, Words, Words
Creating, Editing, And Publishing

Microsoft Gets In The Groove

 

10/11/01

Words, Words, Words
Creating, Editing, And Publishing

Have you noticed a change in your personal or organizational habits?  One of the most basic computer skills we learned – how to process words – has been undergoing significant changes.  We are simultaneously becoming less and more formal, unlearning old skills and learning new ones. 

You may think the last word has been written on this subject (I often wish it had, usually when I’m deep into my archives working on an expert witness presentation based on some ancient word processing State of the Art claim.)  Somehow, I think it has not.  If you’ll bear with some useful history (I’m condensing more than 35 years into a few pages), we’ll get to the point.

An article on Ted Nelson, hypertext, and Project Xanadu (his never quite completed try at building an ideal communications vehicle) on BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1581000/1581891.stm reminded me that I have wanted to write an article on the whole subject of how we got to where we are and how everything is in the process, as usual, of changing.

If you are old enough, your first experience of word processing probably occurred on a special purpose word processing system (remember CPT and Vydec and Wang, to name a few?) or on a general-purpose computer (not a PC), equipped with word processing software (all of them, but particularly the minicomputers of the late 70’s and early to mid-80’s).  I willingly admit my first experience wasn’t on a word processor at all, but rather on a manual typewriter; in college I used to earn an unconscionable amount of extra spending money with my Remington Portable, typing term papers at $1 a page. 

The Word Processing Model

The original word processing model assumed that a secretary or word processing operator, extensively trained (there were lots of codes to learn) would enter text written by a professional worker into the system.  Professionals could make changes quickly since the word processing intermediary needed only to enter the changes, not to retype the entire document. 

Since word processing systems were expensive (typically $15,000 or more) and secretaries and word processing operators cheaper, efforts were made to justify the reorganization of office work so that the machines would be used efficiently (that is, all day long).  Word processing operators entered and edited documents; administrative tasks were performed by separate workers.  Woe betide the large company mid-level professional who needed a document created or changed at 4:45 – or an envelope typed!  We used to regularly get sad little hand-penned notes from Fortune 500 companies in hand-addressed envelopes.

The typewritten letter was the architectural model for how word processors worked and the documents they produced.  Designers assumed the person being trained to use it was previously a secretary or typist so it worked as much like an electric typewriter as possible.  Some models even rolled paper onto electronic screens just as paper rolled into typewriter platens.  Documents had to be able to “pass” for hand-typed.  That meant, for instance, that an impact printer was preferred, since it could produce output that embossed characters on the back of the paper – just as on a typed page.

The Age Of The PC

The personal computer arrived in the business marketplace in the late seventies; it became mainstream with the announcement of the IBM PC in 1981 and word processing simply migrated from special purpose systems to personal computers.  Interestingly, the word processing systems themselves didn’t make the move; they were too busy defending their own turf.  In the meantime, software companies from the CPM market and new startups marched right in, often copying the interfaces and functionality of existing special purpose word processing systems, and took over the market.  A product would gain prominence and success in the market, only to be pushed aside, a few years later, by a better product (or someone who understood better how to take advantage of market breaks and market trends). So WordStar came first, only to be pushed aside, first by WordPerfect and later by Microsoft Word.

A New Style In Computing And Word Processing 

Word triumphed because it takes advantage of a new style in interfaces and word processing.  Earlier word processors assumed that specialist users would be well trained and that each step of producing a document would be the result of the operator’s choice.  Modern word processors are based on graphical user interfaces (GUI’s) and may be Intent-Based (that is, they try to guess what the user will want next, based on what the use has done previously).  For example, if you are entering items in a bulleted list, an Intent-Based Word Processor would assume you wanted to go on doing that until you signaled you were through, probably by asking to start a new paragraph. 

Users of GUI-based software are offered a series of choices via menu bars, pull-down menus (more choices) and dialogue boxes (grouped choices around a particular activity, such as printing, with many of them defaulted based on system standards or previous user decisions).  This means that a less-trained user can more easily sit down at the word processor and produce finished work. In fact, GUI interfaces and Intent-Based word processors weren’t new.  The Xerox Star (which came out as a commercial product in 1980 and was shown as a demonstration of technology for several years before that) offered a GUI interface with pull-down menus and a mouse to access decisions with its point-and-click.  It also offered an Intent-Based Word Processor.  The Apple Lisa and Macintosh (1982 and 1984) followed in Star’s footsteps. 

But it was not until 1990, when Microsoft brought out the third release of its Windows operating system AND a new version of its Word software that the market finally got to “Aha!” and started moving in significant volumes to the GUI interface and its first word processor.  (Today, it is estimated that as much as 95% of new word processor sales go to Word.)

Desktop Publishing Is A Kind Of Word Processing

In 1985, Apple introduced a new kind of word processing, with the more polished look of “almost” the printed page.  Desktop publishing was born thanks to the convergence of powerful personal computers with GUI interfaces, laser printers, and a new kind of software (initially Aldus PageMaker) that permitted print-like manipulations and output.  First the market blossomed, moving to new platforms,  Wintel PC’s and Unix workstations, (c. 1986-88) and then most – nearly all – of the features of a desktop publishing environment migrated into the high-end Apple and Windows word processing products (c. 1988-1990).  Desktop publishing would still be an efficient substitute for precision print jobs, but for much office publishing a high-end word processor would do the trick.

Group Collaboration Around Documents

For most of its history, word processing had been a solitary occupation.  Documents could be printed and shared with anyone, but a solitary and skilled employee did the document creation/entry/revision process.  In the late 1980’s products started to enter the market that allowed users to share documents-in-progress and jointly edit them.  Other products permitted uses to build shared libraries of documents and discussions about this information (Lotus Notes).  At first, these products attempted to offer their own document creation and editing tools, but it quickly became clear that they would need to accept documents from many creation environments and support users who were accustomed to many different word processing and group editing tools.  (I would maintain that no satisfactory group editing tool has ever been created, although many have certainly been offered to the market and some, in fact, get used.)

Enter Email

In the meantime, starting in about 1980, around the same time that the PC was starting to appear in offices, email was moving from an exotic technology into something that in ten years nearly everyone would use.  In the beginning, I can remember giving seminars in which we would stress the Email rules of etiquette – be brief, be informal, get right to the point.  There was even an email editor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania that inserted non-content-related typos into email messages, so that no one would think you were really a typist. 

In the early to mid nineties, however, something changed.  Perhaps it was the volume of email.  Or perhaps it was our discovery that it was a lot easier to find the emails we stored in our computers than the paper documents that lurked all over our offices.  In any case, studies (our own and others) began to show that office workers were creating and sending a lot more of their communications and documents in email, even formal documents like proposals and contracts, than in word processed and printed form. 

But we’re stuck in a silly place where all of the features that let us format easy-to-read, really beautiful documents are in the word processor and the email products we use have many fewer features.  Even if you use an email editor with many formatting features (like the one I use), you have to avoid taking advantage of them unless you’re sure of your addressee’s system and software and default to LCD (lowest common denominator) usage.  That’s why this newsletter uses caps for emphasis (the only thing that survives every editor) and avoids all the bolds, italics, and bullets I like to use.

Publishing To The Web

Nowadays, much of what we publish is either intended for the web – or ends up there, anyway.  In the beginning, it would have been impossible to unintentionally prepare documents for the web since significant webmaster skills were needed in both document formatting and publishing.  Today, however, there are many schemes that allow users to publish to a site with little or no knowledge of web publishing rules.  One can simply identify a document to be published and a place to put it.

That’s good – it lets lots of people communicate at a new level.  In another way it’s bad.  Too many web pages are impossible to read or navigate, rather like the ransom notes of the early days of desktop publishing when some folks thought it was a great idea to use as many fonts as possible.  That problem is self-correcting – no one will read those pages and their publishers will either learn to do better or stop.

We have other problems to solve.  Many of the documents for the web make extensive use of multimedia (voice, video) and hyperlinking.  I willingly admit that I love hyperlinking (since it offers me lots of additional information but lets me decide how much of it I want to look at).  I’m a lot less happy about multimedia.  On an entertainment site it is, of course, appropriate.  When I’m trying to find a price for a piece of software or a hard drive, I can’t imagine what the site owner thinks he is adding to my experience (except the likelihood that I won’t wait for his site to load – or that I’ll be so annoyed that I’ll go elsewhere).

There is another problem, too.  Many of us need to create documents that look great on the web but that can also be printed, either for the user’s needs or for other purposes.  Generally, we’d like to do that without creating another and different version.  We need editors that can strip out things that are only meaningful in an on-line environment and provide a reasonable printed document.  That means more than just printing the document with some things omitted.  For example, instead of the hyperlinks (useless off line), I might want the hyperlink and its underlying URL so I could choose to look it up.

We also need to think about having editors that are really designed around the notion of documents that are intended for on-line only usage.  Today, when I’m creating a document that I’m going to put on one of my sites I write it in a word processor and then we start operating on it to make it into an interesting HTML document.  We have to worry about things like how will the navigation work and where should we put page breaks that think about screensful rather than pages.  One good (but commercially unsuccessful) try at this problem was Dan Bricklin’s Trellix offering (www.trellix.com), now a web publishing platform for ISPs and other service providers, but once a tool for individual publishers with amazing navigation ideas.  We need more attention to this space.

Document Management, Document Sharing, And KM

We’re still working on various ideas around the groupware experiments of the eighties and nineties.  Many of them today focus on document management, document sharing, and knowledge management.  Still others focus on the idea of collaborative commerce that, of course, requires the ability to jointly create, consider, and share documents.  Sound familiar? 

Again, these documents, which will largely live on the web, will probably also need to have a printed version and they will be created and managed by the business professionals who use them – not by some separate group of specially trained intermediaries, so we’ll need very easy ways to set up groups, create documents, and move them around.  Every document management and KM tool will, of course, raise their hand here, but none of them really addresses the problem of how to CREATE the document in the first place, especially if you want some control over its look and format.  Such tools may come from the vendors already in this market, from a new set of vendors who partner with them through open standards, or from a new set of technology providers who sell them piece parts for integration.

What Happens Next?

This is a good place to say that the piece parts business is alive and well.  In fact, today Microsoft and Groove announced a strategic partnership, which is partly about Groove extending Microsoft’s Office XP offering by integrating it with their peer-to-peer Project Management and other software.

We think it’s time to rethink this space.  We need:

• A new interface (we’ve already written about this in We Need a New Interface http://www.wohl.com/wa0162.htm) 
  

• A text tool that assumes it’s going to be used on the Internet as well as to produce emails and printed text
  

• A tool that really understands group document creation and does something more than offering multi-colored pens to mark it up
  

• A tool that doesn’t require looking at the interface for a huge product in order to do anything at all
  

• Something that’s so easy to use anyone can turn it on and create a document and publish it with no outside help (that is, it’s intuitive, obvious, and self-teaching)

Is anyone listening out there?  I’ve worked on over 200 word processors, office automation products, desktop publishers, and groupware tools.  I’m waiting....

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Microsoft Gets In The Groove

Microsoft and Groove today announced that the firms have formed a strategic alliance, recognizing with a minority investment by Microsoft ($51 million) and public acknowledgment of an already existing technological partnership that they share a common vision.

Groove’s Ray Ozzie (the creator of Lotus Notes) was obviously glad to have the money, but seemed gladder still to be in a position to accelerate Groove’s ability to reach customers (they’re in 20 large “blue chip” companies now).  For Groove, this is just an extension of an existing relationship with Microsoft, based around technical initiatives such as integration with Office XP, research on Microsoft’s Tablet PC for collaborative meeting and a series of .NET initiatives. 

Ozzie says Groove and Microsoft will together enrich Web and Peer Services and will work more closely to support cross-company, cross-enterprise collaboration needs.

Microsoft’s Jeff Raikes emphasized the vision Groove and Microsoft share on the future of web services, web-based computing, and the amount of computing power available, especially on Intel platforms. This commitment, Raikes continued, is demonstrated in their mutual commitment to .NET Services and in Groove’s enthusiastic support of .NET

In an extensive Q&A, neither Microsoft nor Groove indicated any specific product plans beyond on intention to use Groove technologies to extend Microsoft products and development environments.  In answer to our question, Ray Ozzie commented, “One of the things about the relationship between by engineers at Iris and now at Groove with Microsoft is that it happens engineer to engineer – you can’t plan what will happen." We’d guess that means it’s a peer-to-peer experience.

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Entire contents © 2001  by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.