It looks like Microsoft Word may eat the blog publishing client market

I met with Darren Strange today, he of the artfully named Office Rocker blog, who is program managing the Office System release for Microsoft in the UK. He is an evangelist/project manager, which is an intriguing combination. An evangelist that actually gets things done instead of talking a good talk. He is a walker and talker in other words.

One of the really appealing things about Darren is that he uses your language when he talks to you, thus engaging wiht me in terms of managed and unmanaged spaces, as two different collaboration styles, with different attendent infrastructures and processes.

Anyway Darren was illustrating some of the new Office system tools – mostly around Sharepoint, which is the new center of the universe in collaborative workgroups for Microsoft.

It struck me, when he showed me blog publishing, from OneNote (a great, if proprietary app), through a Word widget, that Microsoft’s competitors – and various upstarts, have all done a lame job here.

I literally can’t understand how so many firms have failed to nail a two or three year window of opportunity. It just goes to show that while web development is hot, client-side development is evidently a lot harder – VCs have invested in web outfits, not folks that are going to go after MS directly. Maybe its now clear why. The space is not attracting the same kind of people, interested in building out the Synchronised Web, where I can work online and offline and choose my repositories freely – point and synch…

Why is flickr near unassailable – because its web and cliient – its Synchronised Web.

At Redmonk we have made a few calls for blog client functions since we started blogging, wishes for the LazyWeb – such as the abilty to autocomplete links – in other words if I write “John Udell” then I want the link embedded automagically, without having to grab it and repaste.

My current blogging client is Qumana, which is nice if flawed. Sadly the company’s development efforts have focused on providing tools for adding ads to blogs-which doesn’t interest me in the slightest. The tool also also has some stability issues.

I don’t even use Word any more – or rarely anyway – but if I could blog directly, with clean XML (that’s a very important proviso.. haven’t had a chance to use it yet and check it out) I might well readopt Word for the purpose.

Blog editing is a potential killer app for Word 2…

Finally its very clear that Microsoft’s array of assets for online and offline work is ludicrously rich. We like to talk about the power of constraints, but a cornucopia can be hard to argue with.

I know some people are now thinking I am crazy- why not edit by hand, directly into MT, or something? Don’t let Microsoft fool you with abstraction. But many of these people are quite clearly not mainstream adopters-they are edge cases and alpha geeks.

The mainstream is just looking for something easy. If Microsoft can provide a slick connection mechanism to other blog platforms, through Word, it could have a reason to upgade on its hands.

Some people don’t want to mess around with markup. That’s why Microsoft Word is likely to eat the blog publishing client market. I didn’t expect this outcome a couple of years ago, but maybe I am right and Microsoft is indeed the most important company in RSS.

Office System as a whole, is all RSSed up – its a nice idea, if Stephen made a change to a document I could be notified by feed. its all good.

disclaimer: Microsoft is not currently a subscription client, but no I am not just saying nice things in the hope it becomes one.