Microsoft president Steve Ballmer yesterday fleshed out Bill Gates’ vision of the digital nervous system when he announced the company’s knowledge management (KM) strategy in London yesterday. The strategy, which encompasses four new product initiatives seems set to become the marketing cornerstone around which Microsoft position upcoming products and technologies aimed at knowledge workers. Microsoft claims it will also provide umbrella vision for tying in technologies and services derived from business partners or via acquisitions.
The upshot for customers, Ballmer declared, will be the realization of the concept of knowledge workers without limits. Workers who always have the right information, in the right format, wherever they are, and available to them via more human-friendly interfaces and who, as a consequence, Ballmer said, will do their jobs more effectively and enlist their brains for the service of their organization.
Getting the right information to the right people will be achieved through the provision of digital dashboards. Built on Office 2000, these dashboards will filter information as it arrives at the users PC via a forthcoming edition of Microsoft Exchange Server, code-named Platinum, or via corporate intranet portals driven by a new set of technologies, code-named Tahoe.
Platinum technology will also feature in Microsoft’s web store concept, which is designed to provide more uniform information infrastructure open to a variety of client interfaces, including HTTP, OLEDB and MAPI. XML will play a key role in this concept, providing a common approach to information and content classification and categorization. And more sophisticated harmonization of information, including the development of common business vocabularies to span different transaction systems, will be engineered in cooperation with Microsoft business partners which, in the UK, will include Compaq, Baan, Electronic Data Systems, KPMG, ICL and Cap Gemini. Ultimately, said Ballmer, users will be able to use the web store to conduct a single search across all types of corporate data, whether it is held as documents, web pages, calendar notes or database files.
This single search capability will not be constrained by the user’s location either. Building on Office 2000’s concept of ‘meetings without walls’, Ballmer said the company’s wireless solutions initiative will ensure that all digital devices will fit the new knowledge management model, including personal digital assistants, mobile phones and pagers. While the fourth initiative, intelligent interfaces, will focus on ensuring that the end user interface is appropriate to the occasion, and as easy to use as possible. This will include significant investments in natural language, and handwriting and speech recognition extensions to Microsoft Office, plus a news display technology, ClearType, that Microsoft claims will improve the quality of text on LCD screens to near parity with paper.
The timescale for the realization of all these facets of Microsoft’s vision was, however, a little hazy. Some aspects of the announcement will take three to four years to deliver, Ballmer said, although others, such as voice and hand writing recognition were described as just around the corner technologies that should be available within the next year. This presumably means that they will arrive in the first editions of Office 2000, or at least in the first tranche of patches which will almost certainly follow closely on its release.
By this time Microsoft should have hardened its relationship with the systems integration community which, together with Office 2000, is set to be a key element in the delivery of Microsoft’s knowledge management strategy. Business partners will have a key role to play in helping customers to upgrade applications like PowerPoint and Excel to exploit the electronic meeting facilities of Office 2000.
Similarly if Microsoft is intent on using Excel to spearhead a push into the business intelligence market, business partners will be expected to offer the corporate handholding needed to exploit the new version of the spreadsheet’s application programming interfaces that link into the OLAP services and MDX query language integrated in SQL7. This means that Microsoft and its partners could develop simple business intelligence tools, using Excel as a front end, encroaching on the low-end of the BI market.
Some business partners may also be required to provide the base technology to underpin some aspects of Microsoft’s knowledge management strategy. Ballmer was unwilling to reveal exactly where Microsoft was looking, but he did confirm that it would make acquisitions as and when it could, and probably similar to its recent $130m acquisition of Sendit AB, the Swedish smartphone developer (CI No 3,660). Indeed, more acquisitions in this sector certainly look likely. The mobile phone, palmtop and tablet computer sector is something Microsoft sees as essential to complement its strength in the desktop and laptop markets. That’s where we want to go technically, Ballmer said.
