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Bill Gates and the Massively Disruptive 'Sea Change' in IT
11/10/2005
You create a document, invite others to edit it with you. The functionality sends them invitations with a password so that they can view and edit the document. Each time someone makes changes and saves them, a replica of the document--as it currently is saved--becomes the latest link in the right-hand column of saved versions. Of course, you can tell who made which set of changes. And even better, you can compare any version with any other version (or versions) and get a view that shows the original and changes in a single window. After multiple changes by multiple authors, that window is pretty strange looking. However, it is in fact easy to see what the changes have been and who made them.The latest use I am making of it is to draft a call with Chris Davis, of Baker College. He and I are co-editing a special issue of _Inovate: Journal of Online Education_ on the Net Generation/Echo Boomers and we're using Writeboard to draft the call for papers.
But, enough of my thrill at playing with this new tool and back to the sea change. That phrase seems particularly apt when you realize that it is Shakespearean, from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Obviously, Gates is worried that "thy father" could eventually be Microsoft, when the core platform that software uses is fully Web-based and uses the browser instead of an operating system. A Wharton professor writes, in a recent article title Why is Microsoft Afraid of Google, that "As the Internet becomes more of an essential part of the computing experience, if anything else from a network becomes a central link in the user's (that's me) experience, that poses a challenge to Windows and software programs like Office, which has higher profit margins than Windows itself." Yup.
This user is turning from Word to Writeboard. I haven't researched it yet, but I am sure that the online equivalent of Excel is out there also. Once I can start using that, I may not ever need Office on my laptop again. Disruptive change, indeed.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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