uk, tech, rant

> From: A friend
> http://www.upstartle.com/
> undoing of MS Word ?

Unlikely in the short term, but the next two years are going to see a flood of applications built in the browser. Exciting times to be sure, and MS market share is most likely to drop, but that is one reason they have been filing patents at an alarming rate. You know they now have at least 5000 patents?

Office is less about any one tool these days, and much more about the integration of services. Aka one of the main additions to the next version is tighter integration with Search. That sort of thing will continue, and as such make it harder for startups to compete : UNLESS, you have a series of open API's (flickr, del.icio.us and where Yahoo are really pushing), which will allow anyone to plug lots of the pieces together in interesting ways.

This is what MS are missing. They still want to control the whole shop. So even when they are "open", they are only doing it in a token way. Or subtly include some gotcha that will lock you in down the line. Standard, old school, business practise.

Walled gardens never do better than open ones.