Bill Gates and the Massively Disruptive 'Sea Change' in IT

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Bill Gates and the Massively Disruptive 'Sea Change' in IT

11/10/2005

By Terry Calhoun

Last week, Bill Gates said the information technology industry is experiencing a "sea change" that will be massively disruptive. He was speaking of the move to online software and services, from the traditional software-in-a-box model of sales and distribution. He says that, like "The Internet Tidal Wave," the title of his famous memo of 10 years ago, we are about to be hit by a tsunami "services wave" that is quite threatening to a lot of how Microsoft currently d'es business.

I think he's right.

Gates called what's coming a massive and disruptive sea change in a memo to Microsoft top executives a week ago. The Associated Press got hold of a copy recently. He's done this kind of warning thing before, and this one is clearly coming from his perception of threats by Google and other online services, such as Backpack.

I've been using Backpack, a lot. One of the coolest things it lets me do is have the pack of bright, young University of Michigan undergraduate work-study students here at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) work collaboratively on Web mining that is automatically published. For example, although one student is mentioned on this page about Campus Design as managing the page, at least four students are contributing to it.

A month or two ago I noticed a new feature in Backpack called Writeboards. You can tell how busy I have been, with work, volunteer stuff, family, and travel, by realizing that I saw the link to the new feature hundreds of times over weeks before I felt I had a moment to click on it and check it out. It is really cool. For composing text for reports, essays, and the like, it has within a week replaced Microsoft Word for me. Thus, I do understand Bill Gates' concerns. (Aha! I just realized that Writeboard can't give me a word count, so I have to paste this stuff into a blank Word document to get that. But I am sure that's coming soon to Writeboard.)

I've grown to dislike Word in the past year or two. It's clunky, slow, and d'es quirky things that I find personally disruptive. Sure, it may be the way I have it configured, but I am a user and my perception is king in this market. So, yes, even though Writeboard is designed for multiple author collaborations, I am using it instead of Word whenever I can. But it is the collaborative aspects that are the most promising.

No doubt you have worked with one or two (or more) others on a Word document. Someone drafts it. Sends it to others. They make changes using "track changes" and send it back and forth and around and around. Eventually the numbering system on the evolving file g'es funny, or someone d'esn't get the email with the Word attachment, or loses it to their spam filter. The original author might get back four files that have to be conflated into a single document and that is a real pain in the you know what. Writeboard acts like a word processor with wiki-type functionality.