Ink and Office

Here’s a great comment from Chris Pratley (of OneNote fame) as to why the ink features in Office 2003 are similar to the previously released ink office extensions and didn’t boast many new features:

“…it wasn’t that Office couldn’t think of those things, but we used up our whole budget implementing and stabilizing the core functionality. Since the Tablet team had used a similar budget of developers of their own to implement a basic version of what we did in a throwaway add-in, the work we did seemed only incremental since we could not build on anything they did in the office pack. If you had never seen the officeXP add-in, you would have thought the work done in 2003 was substantial (since it was). We warned the tablet team that if they did a throwaway add-in it would make the office2003 work look lackluster, but they needed something at Tablet launch. It doesn’t always work out. Look for much more impressive stuff next time in Office.”

Interesting. This sounds like classic issues or real-world development. I’ve seen the challenge many times before in other projects. To me, I think the “throw-away” authored by the Tablet team was the right decision.

The Tablet team needed something from launch. And my guess is that they were the right ones to do it. They understood ink and more importantly they believed in it. The Office team would be the laggards here–more tuned to the issues of huge markets indicative of cautious and secure development–in a relative sense. They have a huge code base to think about. The Tablet team “just” needed ink. They had speed to market in mind. By developing their own Office extensions they also were closer to the ink core so that if anything needed to be changed on the ink SDK side, they could do so more rapidly. And further, by letting the Tablet team churn out an Office add-in, it gave a competitive reference design for the Office team to chuckle at and “do the right way.” It’s far easier for developers to develop the “good” code when they’ve seen it done already.

The question is whether the Office team understands ink. It’s fascinating to watch their progress. Office 2003 takes a cautionary approach with foundation features whereas OneNote tries a leapfrog approach. No matter. Both development efforts give the teams valuable experience designing for ink and this ultimately is the only way to do it. Microsoft teams are learning how to incorporate ink, just like everyone else. There are no shortcuts.

The “drawback” is that the Office 2003 ink capabilities appear to do little more than the original Office extensions as several people have pointed out. Chris Pratley may think his warnings didn’t work, but actually I think it worked out just right. Sure, you could have wished that the Office team had developed ten times more features, but the reality is that core functionality comes first–setting the DNA of a product. Feature breadth comes later.

In other projects I’ve been on, many times the core developers are able to overcome limitations by re-writing the code. They don’t typically add breadth; they add depth. For instance, maybe after the rewrite users can now have ten times more ink in a Word document or the ink loads ten times faster. I don’t know if this is the case here. My guess is that there’s something to shout about.

In this instance its up to the skill of the marketers to develop the right customer expectations and point out the added value.

I, for one, am glad that I don’t have to download anything extra. Ink is simply there. I have to admit though, I haven’t used any of the Office ink features yet except emailing a couple ink documents. I’m too busy using Journal and OneNote. Hmm.