Microsoft thinks inside the document

The Microsoft world revolves around the word processor. It's collective mindset is one of individuals working on documents with little communication between people. And why not? Microsoft Word (and Excel, and Powerpoint) made Microsoft successful.

The earliest text processors were written in the 1950s, but word processors as we know them today were created in the late 1970s. Products such as Electric Pencil and Wordstar defined the notion of interactive word processing: a person typing on a keyboard and looking at a document on the screen. The term "WYSIWYG" came into usage, as batch text processors grew into interactive word processors.

The mental model is one of the struggling author, or the hard-bitten newspaper reporter, slogging away on a manual typewriter. It is the individual preparing a Great Work.

And this is the model that Microsoft follows. Most of its products follow the idea of an individual working on a document. (Whether they are Great Works or not remains to be seen.) Microsoft Word follows it. Microsoft Excel follows it, with the twist that the document is not lines of text but cells that can perform math. Microsoft Project and Microsoft Powerpoint follow the individual model, with their slight twists. Even Visual Studio, Microsoft's IDE for programmers, uses this mental model. (Not all products. Other products, such as SQL Server and their on-line games, are made for sharing data.) Even Sharepoint, the corporate intranet web/share/library system, is geared for storing documents created or edited by individuals.

The idea that Microsoft misses is collaboration. The interactive word processor is thirty years old, yet Microsoft still follows the "user as individual" concept. In the late 1970s, sharing meant exchanging floppy disks or posting files on a bulletin board. In 2009, sharing to Microsoft means sending e-mails or posting files on a Sharepoint site.

The latest product that demonstrates this is Sketchflow, a tool for analysts and user experience experts to quickly create mock-ups of applications. It's a nice idea: create a tool for non-programmers to build specifications for the development team.

Microsoft uses a Silverlight application to let a person build and edit a description. They can specify windows (or pages, if you want to think of them that way); place buttons, text boxes, and other controls on the window; and link actions to buttons and connect pages into a sequence. (It sounds a lot like Visual Studio, doesn't it? But it isn't.)

I can see business analysts and web designers using Sketchflow. It makes sense to have a tool to quickly build a wireframe and let users try it out.

Microsoft misses completely on the collaboration aspect. Each Sketchflow project is a separate thing, owned by a person, much like a document in MS Word. Sharing means sending the project (probably by e-mail) to the reviewers, who use it and then send it back with notes. That works for one or maybe two users, but once you have more reviewers the coordination work becomes untenable. (Consider sending a document to ten reviewers, receiving ten responses, and then combining all of their comments. Even with change-tracking enabled.)

There is no attempt at on-line collaboration. There is no attempt at multi-review comment reconciliation. The thinking is all "my document and your comments".

The word "collaboration" seems to be absent from Microsoft's vocabulary: a review of the Microsoft-hosted web sites that describe Sketchflow omit the word "collaboration" or any of its variants.

Its time that we take the "personal" out of "personal computer" and start thinking of collaboration. People work together, not in complete isolation. Google and Apple have taken small steps towards collaborative tools. Will Microsoft lead, follow, or at least get out of the way?