Could You Live in a Microsoft Office-less World?

A few weeks back I was intrigued to read that Google employees were banned from using Microsoft office on work computers as reported by the Financial Times. I wondered how on earth they could really live in such a world. Yes I know they have Google Apps and there are many collaborative tools coming along, but considering a world without Microsoft Office still seemed to me like operating a laptop keyboard without hands.

Then yesterday at Boulder Wordcamp 2010 I met a fellow blogger and online manager who works at Jive Software and we began discussing the age-old conundrum of Mac vs. PC. The conversation quickly turned to the topic of using Microsoft Office products on a Mac; at which point I found myself staring face to face with my first true non-Microsoft Office using person. Fascinated, I dug a little deeper into this world to ask how he really gets things done – and where he stores all of his un-polished and not-ready-for-prime time thoughts and documents.

His explanation sounded to me like it would if he was showing me how easy it was to get from San Fran to New York via United Airlines when I’d never heard of airplanes. It became clear that I obviously had not yet embraced this new way of getting things done that involved online collaboration, constant feedback and document sharing that he and his colleagues live daily.

As a result, I can’t fully explain his answers here except to say, for him not using Microsoft Office is a non-issue. He builds presentations for others in some online tool instead of PowerPoint, he keeps word-like docs in Evernote, and he really has no need for managing things like Excel spreadsheets (not his job). I asked if it was a problem to organize hundreds of documents and he assured me it was not. He also uses the Jive software environment (no surprise there) for complete flexibility to share, have others comment and update docs on an ongoing basis.

I woke up this morning still scratching my head on this topic and what I’ve decided is this: there is clearly a shift in work-flow thinking taking place today, driven primarily by the proliferation of social networking and collaboration tools that will take office workers way beyond the patchwork process of creating docs, saving them to a shared drive and emailing others to come take a look at them. This is the promise of “social” that most of us have yet to embrace but we’re seeing take shape in things like Google Wave, Google Apps, Jive Software, and the throngs of other community building tools out there I can’t even name but have only seen in product demos at places like Web 2.0 conferences.

What remains unclear is how we will all ubiquitously share information with those OUTSIDE our immediate network – aka I send you a Word doc you can read it now and what happens when I go to XYZ format you can’t read? And what happens when I’m NOT online? But perhaps again I’m not seeing the whole picture.

Bottom line we are shifting here. And no matter what the end social networking tool will be we’re going to see this as our future more and more. So is Microsoft Office dead? Not yet, but I’m not afraid to say – I think its reign as the de facto standard seems to be coming to an end.