Microsoft moves its Chatter-like OfficeTalk toward commercialization
OfficeTalk — Microsoft's enterprise-focused microblogging technology — may soon find a home among the company's product teams and become a shipping product and/or service. — OfficeTalk, one of the projects launched …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft has been building toward web-hosted Office services since at least October 2007, when it unveiled its answer to Google Docs with Office Live Workspace following the first screenshots of that service earlier that month. The company's rivalry with Google has since hardened into open cloud-competition — the day before this report, the two firms were already framed as fighting a war of 'nines' over service uptime figures.
Now sources indicate Microsoft's internal microblogging project OfficeTalk — described as a Chatter-like tool for enterprises — is being moved toward becoming a shipping product or service. The commercialization claim remains unconfirmed, but it would extend Microsoft's collaboration stack from documents into real-time internal communication, directly into territory Salesforce staked out with Chatter.
First-order effects
- If commercialized, OfficeTalk would give Microsoft a native social layer across its Office and SharePoint customer base, competing head-on with Salesforce's Chatter rather than ceding enterprise microblogging to it.
Second-order effects
- Bundling microblogging into an Office subscription would put pricing pressure on standalone enterprise-social vendors, forcing them to justify separate licenses for features Microsoft ships as part of the suite.
Third-order effects
- Enterprise collaboration is drifting from document-centric workflows toward activity streams and real-time messaging; whichever vendor owns that stream inside the productivity suite gains the default position for workplace communication.
The trend: Productivity suites are absorbing enterprise social networking, as Microsoft follows Salesforce's Chatter in turning microblogging from a standalone category into a suite feature.