Work(ing Title)

If the launch of Office 2007 was a new day at the office, is today only your second day on the job?

Here’s the official blurb…

“Wehave managed to complete the engineering work slightly earlier than we anticipated and are making the download available from OfficeOnline.

What can you expect in Service Pack 1?

SP1 focuses on the issues that matter most to our customers based on direct customer feedback and error reporting tools. You can expect:

• Stability.Using data from the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system, we’ve fixed the top software issues for each application in the 2007 Office system. The 2007 Office system SP1 also improves the stability of server components in the 2007 Office system and delivers compatibility with Windows Server® 2008, so you can confidently plan for future upgrades.
• Performance. The 2007 Office system SP1 improves performance in applications and servers. Performance improvements can be found in Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
• Security. By incorporating incremental advances in security and results from application testing, the 2007 Office system SP1 offers home and office users better protection against malicious software and potential threats to privacy.

Fora full list of improvements in SP1, download the Service Pack 1 whitepaper.

What does SP1 mean for you?

Service Pack 1 eliminates distractions and performance issues that disrupt workflow, allowing employees to be more productive in the work that they do. SP1 is also an important milestone for deploying the 2007 Office system, making it easy to deploy the most secure and reliable version of Office to date.

How do you get it?

Initially, SP1 will be available as a free download from OfficeOnline. SP1 will be made available via Automatic Update in the next 3-6 months, and we’ll issue 30 day advance notice prior to delivering SP1 via automatic update.”

(Mark Bower)

The modern productivity worker isn’t quite as location-monogamous any longer. People are working from their desks, beds, and gazebos. Office Live Workspace is the beginning of Microsoft’s facilitation of this roaming work style. With the service, documents can be posted online directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to be edited from just about any browser. The days of saving a file to your local machine and using a disjointed browser interface to move it online are coming to a close.

Eric Schonfeld’s initial review of Live Workspace for Techcrunch points out a few of the limitations at present. Most file types are only viewable online and cannot be modified. The only editable documents are those created in Microsoft Word, and those cannot be saved to the desktop from the Web Notes online word processor. Also, the ability to sync documents online is currently restricted to those running Windows with Office XP or later.

While the demand for Microsoft to release feature parity with the current crop of online productivity tools, there’s no great motivation to follow suit. As Joe Wilcox pointed out last month at eWeek, current sales are double the previous release, with Office 2007 volume responsible for 17.4 percent of all software that runs on Windows.

With that sort of growth in Microsoft’s traditional software business, there is a reasonable counterpoint to the Web 2.0 communities death knell for software sold in boxes.

photo credit: Ken McGrail

Getting under the skin of this week’s Zune launch, Saul Hansell has posted a three-part interview with Microsoft’s J Allard at the NY Times Bits blog. There’s a great amount of candid conversation around all aspects of Microsoft’s growing entertainment movement.

On the perpetual rumor of a Zune phone:

The phone will be one part entertainment…. What you will see from us is more of these signature experiences. When you see the Zune, you’ll say say, I want my music experience on the phone to be like that. Hey, I want my telecommunication experience on the phone to be more like that.

On the evolution of Zune devices:

I’m a big believer in failing fast… If we skipped last year, we would have never come out with the product we did this year… We learned that because of the shortfalls in the PC client [software], the device was less useful… People hated that there was no podcasts, that they couldn’t fill their cultural cache [the Zune] with the stuff that was meaningful to them.

On the evolution of a new Microsoft entertainment platform:

Today we have Xbox live for $50 a year. We have Zune Pass at $15 a month. We don’t have a rationalized premium version yet. Fast forward a little bit, and you can image a menu like DirecTV. There is basic, there is enhanced, there is movie pack and NFL Sunday ticket.

It’s exciting to see another solid base hit for Mr. Allard. His laser focus on consumer experiences and the interaction between Microsoft and individual human beings is right up my street. There’s a gravity around personalities like J and Ray Ozzie that fill me with a lot of hope. They both seem to understand the importance of user experience, and seem to place more importance on them than traditional Microsoft thinking.

This morning’s Defrag keynote opened with a panel discussion on where the business of search and discovery has come from, and where it needs to go.

Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) made a strong opening analogy by explaining that search is currently an, “experience in orienteering;” the journey to your information begins with a few words, followed by a long period of sniffing out clues. This process repeats until hopefully you find what you were looking for.

Obviously this creates a demand for a major upgrade to the human experience of search. One of the natural solutions is natural language processing, where Microsoft is doing a lot of great work (TellMe, Windows Speech Recognition, and Ford Sync).

Another of the interesting factors in the evolution of search is a pitch for building more topic-specific indexes. Steve Larsen (Krugle) argued a compelling case for vertical search indexes, “In a code-writing search index, Python is never a reptile and always a language.”

This feels like a workaround for the lack of NLP implementation/effectiveness, but as opposed to most instances, that sort of design sounds extremely valuable. I think I might rather have a half-dozen different search engines that I use across a day, assuming they are each much more targeted toward the information I’m looking for. I think this type of strategy could allow for a lot of smaller-scale growth in the search market.

Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) gave an explanation of Flickr’s Interestingness system which brought up the powerful difference between explicit and implicit discovery systems. Explicit systems (voting, rating) are ripe for gaming and rigging, which obviously prevents an honest view of the landscape from emerging. The Interestingness recipe watches views, comments, and favourites across all the system’s photos. In addition though, it weights the value of those actions based on the relationship the author has with the viewer (your brother marking your photo as a favourite is different than a stranger doing the same). Intricacies like that help develop a more honest result set.

The beauty I see in these implicit designs is their invisibility to a user’s actions. Rather than putting the request on the user to think consciously about the value they place on something, the software simply listens and reacts. As Bradley put it so eloquently, “The system changes in the user’s wake.”

When the discussion got to addressing the uncrawlable information trapped behind paywalls and corporate firewalls. Jeremie Miller (Search Wikia) made the comment that as people define knowledge by what is discovered through search, knowledge that doesn’t make it into the index may cease to exist (so far as many people are concerned).

Honestly I’m terrified by the social implications of such a reality; the rift between those with access to the indexes and those without can have dire effects, not to mention the concerns around who controls those indexes.

Everyone can agree that the business of music has been melted down and is currently undergoing a significant reshaping by internet hands (think of it as cheese), and now it Peter Rojas is getting into the game.

Pete mentioned RCRD LBL on his blog this past Monday, following the New York Post’s report on the new venture with Downtown Records.

I don’t think there’s a man who’s better suited to the task of changing the way music is produced and sold, particularly from the inside out. We’ll be watching RCRD LBL with prideful eyes as one of the blogosphere’s finest attempts a new tricki llusion.

[via Ryan Block: A new kind of RCRD LBL]