Post Office Generation (or, how Microsoft lost)
An interesting article on minimalmac about the declining relevance of Microsoft Office:
Microsoft for many years had convinced the world that, in order to get “real work” done, you needed Office.
Techcrunch follows it up with an article about the ’Post Office Generation’:
However, with the rise of tablets, office workers have suddenly noticed that they don’t need Office anymore. All they need is an email app, a notepad, and something like Dropbox. You can open Office docs on any device, you can edit text on nearly any tablet, and $9.99 gets you a capable word processor on the iPad. In short, Office is becoming irrelevant.
While Office is clearly a long way from dead for anyone working in a large corporate, I’ve seen first hand how this is changing for people who don’t. I spent years living in powerpoint, excel and word. Add Lotus Notes in the mix, and that would cover 99% of my non-browsing work time.
Now, my app-stack is completely transformed. My top 3:
- GoogleDocs have changed my life. Probably my favourite collaboration app. Unfortunately, the big weakness is still in spreadsheets – it’s well behind excel for any semi-remote power use.
- Dropbox stores all files. Combined with googledocs, emailing documents is (or should be) a thing of the past.
- Evernote keeps all notes, clips, sounds.
I’ve been meaning to write a separate post on the app-stack for a corporate warrior vs an entrepreneur. That covers my favourites, but leaves a long tail of genius plugins and applications that make work/life at a startup so much more productive and fun.
Office may not be dead, but I can’t see myself ever willingly going back to it.