{this is a mirror post of unreasonablemen.net}
And no it has nothing to do with Vista….
BUT, it does have everything to do with Microsoft Mesh and MS’s S+S strategy. Gianpaolo from the development team outlines a simple S+S example here.
I love Office 2007, the interface is clean, efficient and now very familiar. Far, far, far superior to any web based productivity tools I tested. The problem of course was collaboration and anywhere access. How do I share documents with others and/or how do I access my docs from anywhere. Now I use Office Live workspaces in conjunction to Office. The combination of the two is very appealing:
I use Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) locally to author a document, presentation or spreadsheet and Office Live workspace in the cloud to collaborate with others and as an anywhere access store.
MS’s view of interconnectedness between offline and online worlds, (on premise and cloud computing) requires some sort of synchronisation. This framework is essential for them to retain their incumbent desktop business while paying homage to the growing movement toward SaaS & into cloud computing.
Couple this with some IP based unified communications elements and you get all the functions depicted in the future piece. I’ve watched that video twice, and possibly like many of you found it to be a little surreal. But have a long think about the elements to achieve that.
Ubiquitous networks, unified communications (yip MS is into Telco, more in this bit), shared workspaces, cloud based storage and fileshare. Not that futuristic really…