This year, to my dismay, one key argument was that Office 2003 was geared toward “collaboration.” Forgive me, but when I hear that word applied to software, I reach for my revolver. Ever since the first efforts at what used to be called “groupware,” I’ve been suspicious of efforts to open up applications so that everyone gets to take his or her own shot at a document. Fortunately, no one has really managed to create easy and useful tools to do this, and the history of groupware is littered with the discarded floppies of failed programs. Now comes a new threat.
I certainly understand that in certain circumstances and for certain needs, electronic collaboration is absolutely the way to go. The best example would be, well, the Internet. Applications like e-mail, interactive Web pages with forms, instant messages and even voice over IP (Net telephone calls) are, in a sense, collaborative. No problem there.
I also see some value in programs, including the LiveMeeting software that was also featured in the Office 2003 rollout, that allow you to virtually attend a physical gathering. I won’t speak out against anything that can potentially save you from a plane trip that takes you to an airport-hotel conference room. But the existence of such software leads one to ask ontological questions like: Are you really taking a meeting if you’re not there? Why can’t you just catch up later? Wouldn’t your time be better spent just, um, working? And then you can send your output to whoever’s having a meeting. If they have a problem with it, let them send you an e-mail.
My main worry involves software that replaces tasks once performed by an individual with a system by which a team is involved in every step of the process. I have nothing against teams: I root for some of them, even one as woeful as the Philadelphia Phillies. But when it comes to work I like to engage in something approaching software solitude, letting my teammates tinker with it only well after I’ve done all I can to make it impervious to tampering. I do not countenance virtual kibitzing. Before I say my piece, you can pry my mouse from the fingers of my cold, dead hand. My ideal groupware would make editing or changing my copy as awkward as possible, discouraging such incursions by its very design. Are you getting the idea?
Microsoft believes that its customers think otherwise, and no doubt many of them do. In any case, the company’s thrust in collaborative documents involves a host of products. Anchoring the system are features that transform the components of Office to shared dynamic documents. The sharing takes place by way of something called the SharePoint Portal Server. To quote from a Microsoft fact sheet: “SharePoint sites… provide communities for team collaboration, enabling users to collaborate on documents, tasks, contacts, events and other information. They enable team and site managers to easily manage site content and activity.”
In other words, the architecture of the software itself encourages the process of working by committee. While this is often a necessary evil in corporations and other institutions, it is in many instances indeed an evil. You will often meet people who tend to look at this process as allowing a team to benefit from the collective wisdom of all its members–sort of a one-plus-one-equals-three kind of thing. But cranks like me believe that sometimes one plus one equals minus one. We think that what committees churn out is all too often bland–like that prose excerpt from the Microsoft fact sheet quoted above.
When I spoke to Kurt DelBene, vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group, he tried to convince me that the SharePoint portals were the wave of the future, “a new social dynamic,” he said. He told me that at Microsoft itself, employees had set up 25,000 portals with 4,000 “document workspaces.” He seemed puzzled when I asked him about the kind of person who didn’t want to hang out in portals but just wanted to do his or her work in peace. That behavior, he said, was not something associated with “high achievers.”
Maybe I’m just doomed to being a Bartleby in the brave new world of collaboration. Or maybe when I upgrade–remember, it’s inevitable–my employer will set me up with a SharePoint portal and I’ll have a ball working on future enterprise sections of NEWSWEEK using the team approach. But first one more question: does Linux have collaboration software?
