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Loading ...Even home users of Microsoft Office need to be well ‘Equipt’
If I’d just waited a few more weeks I might not have had to spend so much buying Office.
Thanks a lot, Microsoft, for only announcing your subscription-based plan for users of your productivity suite after I just put money down on a brand-new notebook. Office was part of the bundle they offered us at Future Shop, but it still tacked down an extra couple of hundred dollars to the purchase price. Under the Equipt program, Microsoft will charge users for programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel in much the same way that corporate customers are acquiring new software, and in some cases it could be a lot cheaper.
It will not, however, be free, which is why Equipt is unlikely to stem the tide of free software from Google and other companies. The boxed version of Office was never really in short-term jeopardy anyway. Those downloading OpenOffice and the like are probably more savvy than the average Future Shop customer, and probably not Microsoft fans anyway. For the rest of us, it will take more time before even Google’s productivity tools enjoy the kind of mind share that, for example, Word does. But as long as Equipt costs money, it won’t be able to compete with free, and eventually the features might be even more attractive than the price point. What Google et. al are offering aren’t simply loss leaders; they are market leaders-in-waiting.
IT managers could probably safely ignore Equipt were it not for the fact that home computing software is likely to be used for after-hours work tasks as well. Their choice of productivity tools could have a direct bearing on their acceptance and adoption of the tools that are given to them by their IT department, affecting the level of training required and even the kind of processes that are set up. Google Apps and OpenOffice work a lot like Microsoft Office, but there are some things they do better or worse, and several things they do a little bit differently. That can affect things when you’re working with distributed teams, some of whom are working off-site at home or in the field on their personal laptop.
For companies that have basically standardized on Microsoft, it might make sense to recommend Equipt, giving employees the chance to stay as up-to-date on the home versions of their software as the ones on their office desktops. For others, it might be irrelevant. It all depends on whether these software products remain simple productivity tools, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they aren’t. As word processing documents, spreadsheets and similar applications get integrated with enterprise business functionality (including analytics), what users deploy at home should be consistent with their corporate settings unless management decides productivity should be confined to corporate headquarters.
Although we still refer to “professional edition” and “home edition” for a lot of people, Microsoft Office is just “Office.” Equipt will be one of the ways the industry learns whether the distinction still has a lot of meaning for the consumers that get a lot of work done outside of “work.”
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Google shouldn’t corner the market as an agent of organization
We all know what Google does. So why don’t more users understand what IT departments are supposed to do?
If nothing else, the search engine firm managed to corner the market on a great mission statement. Rather than describe itself as a business that helps people find what they’re looking for online, Google has said it wants to “organize the world’s information.” There are probably a lot of other companies that wish they’d thought of that one, because it touches on so many areas of data, content and process management.
In a recent article on Harvard Business Publishing’s Discussion Leader Web site, Umair Haque uses Google’s mission statement as the jumping-off point for a more thoughtful exploration of business purpose. He forms this as “A Manifesto For The Next Industrial Revolution,” and suggests that growth is contained the inherent DNA of any organization. How that growth is channelled, though, is another matter.
“What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges,” Haque writes. “Here’s what it looks like. Organize the world’s hunger. Organize the world’s energy. Organize the world’s thirst. Organize the world’s health. Organize the world’s freedom. Organize the world’s finance. Organize the world’s education.”
Haque stresses that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list but the beginning of a discussion among business leaders. “If you’re a corporate boardroom, and you’re not refocusing and restructuring to meet these new challenges – here’s the bottom line: the next industrial revolution has your name written all over it,” he says.
IT departments are only one component of a business, of course, but they are routinely characterized as (theoretically) a key enabler of growth. Therefore, technology becomes the tool by which a company would attempt one of Haque’s worldwide efforts at organization. The problem is that many firms, even if they had this kind of ambition, tend to identify it only as they evolve. Then turn to their CIOs and IT managers to figure out the means to make it happen from a resource and in some cases process/workflow perspective. If IT isn’t really prepared to enable the organizing, the company is bound to fail.
Maybe the real first step is for technology professionals to determine their own personal mission statement, based on the model in Haque’s manifesto. Though this could vary by industry, a common one based on the role should be possible. If Google is all about organizing the world’s information, for example, perhaps IT managers should think of themselves as responsible (at least collectively) or organizing the world’s knowledge. Too highfalutin? Maybe, but not if you’re an IT manager who really wants to get closer to the business, to understand it and drive it forward.
Take the opposite approach: There a lot of people for whom “management” is a four-letter word, something difficult to really define unless you’re doing it really badly. But people understand the difference between something that’s organized and disorganized. What if IT managers thought of themselves as IT organizers? It might sound a little too tactical and less strategic. But organization requires strategy, and helping people get quicker access to knowledge is a worthy goal of any individual or company. Technology professionals might want to consider it for a manifesto of their own.
