At the Office Developer conference today Bill Gates, in his keynote speech with Steven Sinofski (VP for Office), defended the ‘full blown productivity suite’ that is the desktop version of MS Office.
When asked by a delegate what his take on the Google purchase of Writely was Bill responded that users have long since had the capability to save their files on a web server. He then went on to say that the Rich Text editing model that Sharepoint 2007 offers is better than what Upstartle did with Writely and “we didn’t make it a whole company” (laughter).
It’s a good point MS Content Management Server had some great text editing tools that ran in the browser and didn’t preach to be Web 2.0. That can only have been advanced now that CMS and Sharepoint have been rolled into one product.
As for Ribbon-X (Microsoft’s XML based menu schema for the Office ribbon UI), well it sounds like a storyline from a comic published by Marvel.