Over the last few weeks I’ve been musing about innovation and the software development process, partly because I’ve taken on a number of new Microsoft products and have been wondering about their origins, and partly through discussions with various people comparing what small teams have achieved set against those in much larger companies. Over at Sandhill, fellow Enterprise Irregular Erik Keller is looking at this from the point of view of the negative side of the consolidation going on in our industry. I’ll come back to that issue, and ask why is the best software is so often developed by two guys in a garage? First though, closer to home, some software on my desktop.
I’ve recently upgraded to Microsoft OneNote 2007 and switched to Windows Live Writer, so now I regularly switch between three different text editors (including Word 2003) on my desktop. Why do I need three? Although they all come from Microsoft, they all seem to be developed by different teams?
In researching OneNote I came across this 2005 Channel 9 video podcast from August 2005 of Scobleizer talking to Chris Pratley and Owen Braun in the atrium of building 18 at Microsoft’s HQ. Just as an aside, this highlight’s how raw video podcasts can be and still be quite effective - just a guy holding a cam corder, asking questions of a couple of guys he grabbed between meetings. At the time Chris was group program manager for OneNote, Word and Publisher, and Owen was Lead program manager for OneNote. Chris explains that OneNote came out of a conversation he had with his senior VP. Chris had been wondering about creating something to handle all of those “factoids” you accumulate and deal with during the working day. The VP thought they should create a new application to deal with the process of preparing to make a document, and Chris wondered if they could expand that to a program for dealing with:
“managing all the bits of junk you have.”
That fits with me perfectly, and so OneNote was born. OneNote is where I log everything, and start to create things that eventually get published as a Word document, or a PowerPoint presentation, or a blog entry, or a brochure (where I might use Publisher for the layout).
But how about Windows Live Writer? I found this Harrison Hoffman LiveSide podcast interview with J.J. Allaire, the architect of Windows Live Writer and founder of Onfolio. So I learned that Live Writer came with Microsoft’s acquisition of Onfolio. They had already started developing Writer as a web publishing tool to compliment their other products prior to the acquisition. J.J. explains that their vision was to extend Onfolio from collecting and acquiring information in to publishing.
He describes the three key things they wanted to do well that make Live Writer different and that they hope will make people switch over:
- The WYSIWYG editor picks up the style of your blog so that as you edit, you get the look and feel of the way it will actually look on the site. As well as this option there is a standard WYSIWYG edit mode, a preview mode so you can see how it will be published in situ and a HTML source code view.
- They handle graphics in terms of uploading, accessing online systems like Flickr or maps, positioning, thumbnailing, use of effects and resizing in a comprehensive and easy way.
- They built a developer SDK and the ability to create plug-ins to allow people to add enhancements to Live Writer.
Their goal for the product is to be compatible with all of the blog platforms that are being used, and it already covers a large range of services right “out of the box”. They use the various web publishing standards, and over time they plan to extend the product to handle all forms of content for web publishing for things like wikis, image galleries, support for picking up product data with embedded links, handling content with microformat markup for events and reviews and the like.
I can see that trying to put all of these different note taking, lay out and editing capabilities in to a single product would just make it too complex and unwieldy. The idea of content starting as a “scrap” or one liner and being developed in OneNote, and then subsequently being picked up by Live Writer, or PowerPoint which are optimized to the way I want to present and publish that content makes good sense. It would be nice if the interface wasn’t, more often than not, cut and paste. But it is interesting that Microsoft have examples of good product emerging from inside such a large organization, as well as innovations acquired through acquisition.
However, Erik’s point is that the current consolidation in our industry has the potential to stifle that innovation, so I’ll be coming back to that in an upcoming post.
