How Will Microsoft Get to Albany?

There is crazy speculation that the Microsoft beta program is a hosted productivity suite for consumers, something to compete with Google Apps. The feeding frenzy has increased, as this myth spreads across the Web.

There's nothing substantive here. For starters, the cryptic beta invitations don't mention hosted productivity anything.

I hadn't planned to blog on the Albany nonsense, but this urban legend keeps getting bigger with each telling. Somebody has to yell, "Stop!"

Albany is supposed to be a consumer product, which should be information enough to know that it absolutely is not going to be an online productivity suite. Why? Most consumers don't need an online productivity suite. In December, a NPD survey found that 94 percent of U.S. consumers had never tried an online productivity suite; a mere 0.5 percent have substituted Web-based productivity suites for desktop software such as Microsoft Office.

Weak adoption would seem to validate the value of desktop software over Web-based alternatives. Absolutely not, because:

• Most software applications, like e-mail and messaging, that people use everyday pack most of the formatting and other content creation features that most everybody needs.
• Most consumers create content that stays in digital form and in formats that are easily shared (like text, HTML or JPEG).
• Other than plain or lightly formatted text, most created or consumed content is in some form other than word processing or spreadsheets. The sole productivity exception could be presentations.

Office isn't better than, say, Google Docs just because Web-based alternatives have low comparable usage. One is just less relevant than the other, and that's not saying Office is hugely relevant to consumers. Most people don't need Office, either, because the suite doesn't produce the kinds of content that's most important to them.

If I'm wrong and Albany is a hosted productivity suite, then Microsoft is run by a bunch of obsessed Google chasers incapable of making sensible business decisions. Albany is more likely about content that consumers regularly create or consume. These content types include blog posts, e-mails, instant messages, photos and music. The context for most common content types is social interaction. Most any Facebook or MySpace page is evidence enough of the trend.

Around these interactions identity, privacy and security are among the sensible concerns—that people are who they say they are and content sharing won't lead to malware infection or loss of personal information.

Based on what consumers do create and their online social behavior, Albany could be anything from an amalgamation of Messenger, OneCare and Spaces to Hotmail, Photo Gallery and Popfly. I won't speculate. Yet.

Today's bigger news isn't Albany but Adobe Photoshop Express. The exciting Flash-based service compliments Adobe's Buzzword word processor. Both services are in beta.

If anybody is cobbling together an online content creation suite, it's Adobe. Microsoft should worry loads more about Adobe than Google. Besides Buzzword and Photoshop Express, Adobe has in testing:

• Brio (Web conferencing)
• Kuler (color theme chooser)
• myFeedz (social newspaper)
• Share (content collaboration and sharing)

A truly competitive online suite would look more like the above products combined and less like online versions of Office or Works. Again, the possible productivity application exception: Presentation software. Adobe needs a video application at least, or a Web-based version of Vlog It! or Premiere Elements. But the pieces are in place for an online content creation suite.

Something else. Adobe is doing a surprisingly better job embracing Web 2.0 platform services than Google and, not surprisingly, Microsoft. For example, the Photoshop Express supports Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket content. Flickr and MySpace would be important additions, but Facebook makes an important social connection.

Circling back to Albany, Microsoft would be smart if the product/service amalgamation focused more on what most consumers do create and how they share it. Maybe when Microsoft gets to Albany, it will live in an Adobe adobe house.