It’s no secret that Microsoft has been hard at work at a true touch-based version of its Office suite, not only for Windows’ Metro interface, but for iPad and Android tablets as well. But little has been revealed about its timing or its content. I’ve decided to let my imagination run free to create a mental picture of this office of the near–I hope–future. (I’m not the only one. Two of the most astute analysts of the tech scene, Ben Thompson (@monkbent) and former Windows and Office chief Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) have been conducting on ongoing discussion of the future Office on Twitter.)
A key element in my thinking is that the Office users who really matter are in business, or at least professionals of one sort or another. Yes, a lot of consumers and students use Office today and will continue to. But they have many other options and are likely to continue to drift away from software that is more complex and often more expensive than what they need. Consumers are not the future of Office.
The new Office needs two drastic changes. The fairly simple one is to change the way Office applications connect to the cloud. Office 13, by default, saves files to SkyDrive/OneDrive, with SharePoint as an alternative. On Windows tablets there is a fairly simple workaround to connect with other services because they can be integrated with the file system. But neither iOS nor Android gives users file system access, so the Office tablet apps have to come with built-in hooks to a broad range of cloud services including private SharePoint sites, Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive (yes, really.)[pullquote]A good starting point is the realization that touch tablets are not going to be used much for the creation of complicated documents.[/pullquote]
The much hard part is designing apps that really work on touch interfaces. This will necessarily require a drastic simplification of the complex, menu-driven user interfaces which requires eliminating a lot of features. It’s long been a standing Microsoft joke that every user of Word utilizes only 10% of the functions, but everyone uses a different 10%. Of course, this is not actually true; I suspect a Pareto analysis would pretty quickly yield a common core of functions that nearly everyone uses and a galaxy of rarely used features.
A good starting point is the realization that touch tablets are not going to be used much for the creation of complicated documents. You might use a tablet, particularly if it has a auxiliary keyboard, to write a quick memo or do some simple spreadsheet computation, but you are not going to write a white paper or build a financial model. Those will be jobs to be done on desktops or laptops and only occasionally tweaked on a tablet.
In Word, for example, you will be able to dispense vast areas of functions, including many of the more complicated layout, formatting, and style options. It would be best if the applications embed any fonts use, since substituting from the limited range of fonts available on a table will almost always cause problems with the precision rendering of documents. No one in their right mind is going to be using a tablet to create footnotes, end notes, bibliographies, indexes, tables of contents, or tables of authorities. Does anyone really need WordArt, SmartArt, QuickParts or a long list of options that don’t believe I have ever needed, even as a heavy user of Office?
On the other hand, what is inescapable? I think that one scenario that will come up a lot is someone creates a document, then sends it along to a reviewer, who may give it a look on a tablet. The single most critical option will be the full palette of reviewing tools, especially Track Changes and Comment. For spreadsheets, tablets aren’t much good for creation, but they could be very useful for analysis of modest sized layouts. So while you can eliminate a lot of functions, you want to keep the analytical tools, especially pivot tables.
The process, in other words, is not the usual kitchen sink approach,but a very careful selection of essential tools based on a careful study of use cases. I can only hope that this process is already well along. It will take all the cleverness UI designers can come up with to get all of the functioned deemed absolutely necessary into a clean and functional tablet UI. As we have seen with apps such as Apple’s own iPhoto for the iPad, the UI is still a work in progress.
Another huge issue will be the price. I expect the logical solution for Microsoft is to include tablet versions with no additional charge in the consumer, education, and small business versions of the subscription Office 365, with a similar deal for corporate subscribers. That’s going to hurt a company that is used to charging a lot of money for its software, but it is the way the world works today.