Matt Asay on Microsoft's Achilles Heel

Matt Asay says something profound, buried in a post about a new competitor to Microsoft Office, Live Documents. I agree with his dismissal of that effort, and for the same reasons that he does:

[from Microsoft's Hotmail founder goes for the (wrong) Office jugular with Live Documents | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs]

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The future of the desktop is not an online desktop. It's getting rid of the desktop metaphor altogether. The future of an office suite is to dump the office and focus where people spend their time: email, IM, SMS, blogs, etc. We increasingly collaborate as we create rather than create so that we can then collaborate on what we've already done.

Look at Microsoft's idea of office collaboration. It's mired in the era of Flock of Seagulls and The Buggles. Microsoft is desperately trying to upgrade this vision with Sharepoint because its Exchange technology is so old and creaky that it can't support the innovation that would other ensure Microsoft's next two decades of dominance.

I completely agree. Microsoft is fighting the last war all over again. Stuck in a past success, like the CEO who said to me "We don't need to do the right thing, because we do the wrong thing so well."