A couple weeks back, I watched in horror as Microsoft Word insisted on butchering a contract that I was working on with my company’s general counsel. No matter what he did, Word unhelpfully shifted formatting and mangled clauses. An arsenal of editing tools, over a dozen years in the making, and yet it still fails making a basic word-processing task simple.
Now, in the past I’ve blamed the user for not learning how to use their tools. Sure, I thought, office productivity software requires some education, but even a pencil requires effort to learn how to use (remember grades one through seven) – why should general office productivity be any different? Shouldn’t we expect some general level of proficiency from a user?
Therein lies the problem – the user needs to invest in learning a set of generalized functionality that far exceeds the actual functionality they need to achieve their given task. The company lawyer doesn’t need a generalized word-processor, he needs an application that understands the standard form of legal contracts (clauses, sections, subsections), and provides limited spell-checking and redlining capabilities. Instead, Word provides a plethora of infinitely reconfigurable editing and formatting options that simply make no sense in the context of the production of a contract. The application is simply too powerful.
Users are paying for it – not only in terms of the price of a piece of software that contains more functionality than they could even hope to use, but also in terms of lost productivity.
Prior to this realization, I didn’t really think online word-processing tools like Writely, ZohoWriter, and Writeboard could hope to compete against Word. Now I’m not so sure. A little refresher of the tenets of disruptive innovation highlights the characteristics that indicate online word-processors may have what it takes to undermine Word over the long term. According to “The Innovator’s Dilemma“, disruptive technologies generally:
- Underperform established products in established markets
- Are cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more easy to use
- Provide features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value
The last point is the critical one – providing new features that a few fringe customers value. Perhaps profession-specific toolsets might be one such way to achieve such differentiation from the behemoth that is Microsoft Word. Provided they don’t give Microsoft too many free ideas along the way.
And in other immigration news, I couldn’t help but recall a certain message from Tyler Durden in “Fight Club” as I watched the news from last weekend’ massive immigration-related demonstration in LA for undocumented alien rights: