Microsoft’s next move:

With all the talk about the Vista debacle and the possible Yahoo acquisition, it is easy to forget that MS makes a lot of money on Office. With Adobe’s release of Acrobat 9 and creation of acrobat.com, the gauntlet has been tossed. Microsoft must now pick it up and try and take on Google and Adobe in a head to head contest over who will dominate content creation and collaboration in the virtual work place. They have a good start in SharePoint and Silverlight but they have yet to answer with a portable document format.

If I might make a humble suggestion, I would like to see the interface for Word change to look more like MS Paint or a tack board or even PowerPoint. Yes if I am writing a letter it is one thing, but the moment a picture, table or text box goes into the document, the document should be live. I want the picture to go where I put it, and the text to properly wrap around it, and use the margins I set for it. I want thumb tack icons to make things stick to the page and not move around. I want to select sections of text as a module and move them around, to layout a page. It is time for all the weird formatting that is a legacy of the days when Word was a word processor to give way, so Word can be reborn and remove the need for pdf’s.

I would like a lasso tool for Excel. I want to open a text file, lasso what I want the columns to be and have it auto-convert to a spreadsheet. I also want better visualization tools and the removal of the 16 and/or 32 bit file limitations. If there are 64 bit OS’s then people should be able to work with information in 64 bit spreadsheets.

I am suggesting, but what I am suggesting is substantive changes to MS’ flagship product, not the use of pastel colors for the buttons. That might be too much to ask, as a baby step perhaps MS could try hybridizing Word and PowerPoint, and create a rich content file editor.

Selling Office dirt cheap to students is a good start, it won't be enough to stop Adobe or Google. MS will need a rich content file solution, a low cost Sharepoint like solution, (think Sourceforge meets MySpace for documents), and a way to get SilverLight into people's hands.