What’s Wrong with SkyDrive?

So here we are in 2010 and Microsoft SkyDrive is still sitting around not doing much. Yes, you can now edit Excel and PowerPoint files online, but Word, the tool that most of the world still has to use, is still unavailable for editing. Also, when you view your Documents folder, you have no option to select multiple files at the same time and perform an action to all of the files at once….in 2010…from the biggest software company ever.

They must be devoting a paltry amount of money and time to this service. Then, there is Office Live Workspace, which offers a better view of files, albeit one that looks like SharePoint in the cloud. Still, there is no ability to edit the document outside of Word on your local PC. What is the deal? Google Docs, which does not have as good an interface as Word, is still able to do all these things and has been for some time.

The issue can’t be ability, because Microsoft has to have the capabilities to do these seemingly simple tasks. Is Microsoft undergoing internal debates about how user-friendly to make these services and thereby taking forever to improve them? After all, who would really want to pay for Office anymore if we have the ability to do everything on SkyDrive, Office Live or some future combination of all these weird services in combination with free stuff like OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat.com and Google Apps? But that is the future, whether Microsoft fights it or plays along. If they don’t want to make it available, Google will just keep cleaning their clock, even though Google’s interface and icons are corny and cartoonish at this point.

Either way, looking at SkyDrive and all of Windows Live you get the feel of 2004 or so. It looks like no one has thought about it much, it doesn’t work well, it seems poorly designed and it is ugly. Maybe this will all change. I hope so because I’d like to use it more.

Office Live

Since I have a little used Sky Drive account I checked to see if I qualified for the roll-out today of Office Live (Office 10 online) which competes with Google Docs and Acrobat.com (Buzzword). I also have an Office Live Spaces account which I only use to see what it does. Anyway, I do indeed have an invite to use Office Live. Right now I can only create and edit Powerpoint and Excel files. All I want to do is edit Word files, so I’m impatient to see how that works.

I think Adobe might also be doing a Buzzword update tonight, and I find that more interesting right now. It makes sense however that Office Live will use Skydrive as storage and Spaces as a kind of online SharePoint.

Dying Newspapers and Design

There’s a lot of talk out there about the fate of newspapers, how we get our news, and things like that. I go to Drudge for my first pass at news, then to the NY Times. Why read the Times? Not because I like it or agree with it, I don’t. Their coverage is awful and their inherent anti-Jesus bias shines through all the time. The reason I read their stuff is simply because I find their site the easiest to use and the most like what I want an online paper to look like.

Every other news site that I look at suffers from horrible design and an ugly interface. I occasionally look at the Washington Post, but it’s an awful site. Bad colors, links all over the place in an illogical order, and bad flash content. The Washington Times is worse, with too much static content, bad pictures and overwhelming adds. The Wall Street Journal is dark, heavy and hard to navigate. Some of the London papers are ok and the Financial Times is ok if you can get past the color scheme.

But the NY Times has a simple, clean design. The stories are grouped logically by section and the whole homepage looks like a paper, with the pictures in the middle acting as the fold of a printed newspaper. I know where everything is and it stays there. The pictures and photo essays are superb and I love looking at them. I hate their politics and their point of view, but it’s usable. That’s the only reason I read it.

If these papers want to flourish online, they need to invest some serious time and money in design. If they get clean designs and usable sites, they will have a chance to flourish online. I don’t know about the printed versions surviving, but maybe the e-plastic reader or some other form of digital ink will save them in time.

Delete an Adobe Account

If you have an account with Adobe online and you want to delete it, you’ll find no instructions on how to do so. At least, I didn’t find any. So I asked about it, and here is how you do it:

Send an email to privacy-officer@adobe.com. In the email, include the following:

Customer First and Last Name:
Customer ID Number:  [if you know it]
Customer email address:
Customer request:

They should get it done within a week or so.

Adobe Buzzword and Acrobat.com

Well, the long-awaited release of the updated version of Buzzword is here! Buzzword is now integrated into what is called Acrobat.com, something that exits both online and as an app on your desktop – Mac or PC. Acrobat.com integrates with Share, for PDF and file sharing, Create PDF, which does what the name implies, Meet, which allows net meetings. It is now possible to upload and share files, have net meetings, and work in a sophisticated web processing environment – all for free.

I’m not sure about what all is new in Buzzword, but I do see that export to PDF is now enabled. I imported a Word document as an experiment, and it worked flawlessly. You can export to the formats shown below:

There are lots of things that we still need to see, for example:

Supporting the ODF format;

Supporting paragraph styles;

Supporting XML import-export;

Something like Lovely Charts for Acrobat.com;

Integrating Photoshop Express and other similar apps in the suite.

But I think we are headed towards seeing all of those things. And right now, this is an awesome set of apps that is free and beautiful. I would imagine that heads are turning in Redmond, and that they can see the end of their business model on the horizon. Granted, Office can do tons of things that Acrobat.com cannot do right now, but at the basic level of functionality that most people use word processors for, Buzzword is quickly ramping up to smash Word.

Google Docs improves

It was getting to the point where I wouldn’t use Google Docs anymore for much of anything. This was due to the advent of Buzzword and my love for it. But Google has taken a small step forward with the advent of a fixed-width page view inside Google Docs. It makes for a bit better interface, and restores some usefulness to G Docs.

Business writing

Some time ago, I was asked a few questions about what would be valuable to learn about business writing. These were my thoughts:

Think about what types of business writing are needed and frequently encountered in the workplace. What are expectations or standards of quality that most companies expect?  

The most obvious and ubiquitous form of communication now is e-mail. It is crucial to internal and external presentation that thought is given to font choice, color choice, length, and tone. Using fonts like Comic Sans or pink type in business communication can communicate an unprofessional demeanor.
I belive that almost every American buisness today uses PowerPoint and Excel heavily. It is very helpful for writers to understand how to effectively construct charts and PowerPoint presentations that are not cluttered and communicate effectively. I would refer learners to the works of Edward Tufte, particularly on avoiding ‘chart junk’ and on some of the potential pitfalls of PowerPoint.

What writing skills would businesses like people to acquire?  

Essential grammar skills remain foundational to all communication. Beyond that the way we write is changing from long, linear documents to ‘chunks’ of information that can be swapped in and out of different documents. Writing in this type of module fashion vs. a linear fashion can be difficult to excel at. Blogs are catching on in some sectors of the marketing world, and I think viewing examples of corporate blogs that communiate well – and how to author such blogs – would be beneficial.

What types of documents would you classify under business writing? Resumes? Press Releases? Letters/Memos? Reports? Announcements? Advertisements?, etc  

All of the above, and I would add: marketing datasheets, user manuals, online help files, corporate blogs, and web page content.

Cool free things

Well, OpenOffice has extensions for:

Latex

Google Docs

Unbeknownst to me, Microsoft also has a book search function, like Google’s Books that I have grown to love:

Live Search Books

You have probably already heard about Adobe’s free Photoshop roll-out last week. I see big things coming there. Integrating BuzzWord, Share, Photoshop and more could make for a really cool set of apps. I think we will see great things from BuzzWord this year, including a desktop version, easy export to PDF as text, and the beginnings of templates, styles, and PhotoShop integration.

The end of Office

I think that 2007 was a watershed year for the end of the Microsoft Office empire. There are so many quality tools out there now that provide viable alternatives to Office, that it is no longer necessary to have Office. The NY Times talked about it recently. The only gates to the revolution are the institutional acceptance of Office, which demands that papers and documents at schools and businesses be turned in using Word, Excel, etc. Thus, the issue of interoperability is the key ~ can documents be saved into .doc format, for example, and look ok? To me, PDF solves this issue, but professors and managers don’t all have, or know how to use, Acrobat Professional, and so the need for word processors continues.

Let me review some of the tools that I use that are free, and in some cases more aesthetically pleasing than Office.

1. Buzzword. I can’t say enough about Buzzword, I just love it. Buzzword saves to .doc, and .docx amongst other formats. It doesn’t save to PDF yet, but should soon. The interface is elegant, the font choices, although limited, are very nice, and best of all, it’s free.

2. Adobe Share. Share allows you to upload PDFs and share them with people, or embed them.

3. Google Apps. Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Presentation give you the free ability to do a lot of what Office does. I’m not wild about the Google interface, it looks a little cartoonish and doesn’t do all the things that Word does by a long stretch. It does export to Word, Open Office, and PDF. Again, it’s free.

4. Lovely Charts. Sort of a Visio alternative, I just signed up so I’m not sure about it yet. But I think the interface is clean (built on Flash of course). Some day perhaps it will export to Visio, but who cares? It’s an alternative.

5. OpenOffice. If you want to download a large Office alternative you can use OO. It is bulky, and not accessible online like Buzzword, but it does a lot.

6. IBM Lotus Symphony. This group of tools should be available for Macs this year, right now it is only on PCs. It’s sort of slow and a resource hog, but it gets the job done like Word does.

With all of that said, I have been using Office 2007 at work recently, and I really like it. But I wouldn’t want to pay for it at home. Microsoft ought to get radical and make it free, then we would see a true revolution. I’m also using iWork 08 at home, and I love, love, love Pages. So there are a lot of options out there, but I think we are living through the end of the Microsoft hegemony.

Cool fonts

There are some free fonts available for download here. Click Typefaces > For Free. Although I like the free ones, I like others more. Anziano is a really gorgeous font, and I wish I could afford it. I’m putting the picture of Anziano type below: