Don Marti

Thu 09 Feb 2006 05:21:49 PM PST

Word processors again

Interesting coincidence of items coming over the feeds.

Steve Gillmor on, among other things, "Office is dead", and these little pearls of wisdom from Lifehacks on how to make your word processor environment work kind of like an online editing environment, only with some extra work.

Instead of using word procesors as better typewriters, which they are, or as easier-to-use desktop publishing tools, which they are, people are using them as collaboration tools, which they're not. Why?

Blame the Law of Macrofromological Communications: people use the communications tools that the big cheese uses. Your boss is probably frequently traveling or otherwise offline, and will be able to open an email attachment but not your latest changes that you commit to a collaboration system. Word processors do run local.

We don't get working social software for business until we lose the word processor/email attachment mode of working, but we don't get that to happen until the next-generation system will run offline, on a traveler's laptop. Critical path: Offline AJAX.