The war between the giants of the technology industry for the attention of the world’s office workers looks like it is about to take an unexpected turn.
Fundamental changes in the daily lives of millions of so-called “information workers” have already triggered a corresponding upheaval in the technology tools on which they rely. Staples such as email and Microsoft’s Office suite of products still hold sway, but they are increasingly being supplemented by services like group chat, internal social networks and shared online document editing.
Now, Facebook’s ambition to create a version of its social network for the office promises a new twist. The prospect of a giant consumer internet company invading office life is not new.
Google has already ridden the rise of the internet into the working world, with its Gmail service and a cloud-based equivalent to Microsoft’s Office suite of software tools. Yet for most white-collar workers, still tied to their PCs, Office still reigns supreme.
The spread of mobile devices is forcing deeper changes, particularly in the way groups of workers communicate and share information. The result has been a deeper challenge to Microsoft’s grip on the software of working life.
For seven years after the launch of Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft left its mobile flank exposed, holding Office back from devices made by other companies in a failed attempt to stimulate demand for its own Windows-based mobile gadgets. But even its decision to reverse course this month and make Office free on Apple devices may not be enough to give it the foothold in mobile it needs.
“The problem is not that Office is too expensive, it’s that Office isn’t relevant to the way people want to work,” said Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, a mobile-centric service for storing and organising personal information that claims 100 million active users, 70 per cent of whom use it at work.
The needs of workers are changing fast, admitted Julia White, general manager of marketing for Office. Mobile access is expected. Communication between groups of employees has become far more open, while collaboration around work happens instantly. The sheer volume of information, for many workers, has become overwhelming.
One result is that barriers are breaking down between, on the one hand, networking and collaboration tools, and, on the other, services for creating and editing documents, said Libin.
“You don’t need different tools for communicating and for writing,” he said, describing the separation of these activities into different software applications as a relic of the days when visions of technology were dominated by the telephone and the typewriter.
As the pressure on workers mounts, the many tools for creating, storing, sharing and collaborating are starting to converge. It is “less about collision and more about integrating different services”, said Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, which runs a cloud storage service for companies. “If Facebook at work takes off, they will want to get to your data in Box, and edit it with Office,” he said.
That reflects how new business software markets often start out, with “best of breed” suppliers dominating different technology niches. Once these markets mature, however, consolidation often leaves dominant suppliers in control, as happened with Office, said Libin. “The centre of gravity will shift to platforms in a number of years,” he added.
For now, with most new services in their infancy and dominant consumer companies such as Facebook and Google still to make an impact, that end-game seems a long way off.
As a result, new start-ups like Slack, whose service is used by groups of workers to communicate and share information from different sources, are growing like weeds between the paving stones of existing software products.
Many workers are also spending more of their time within online applications that are tailored to the needs of specific jobs. Some of these are “horizontal” services such as Salesforce’s customer relationship management service or Github’s platform for software developers.
Others are “vertical” ones that are geared to specific industries or professions, like the Doximity service used by 40 per cent of US doctors, and Edmodo, used by 3.5m teachers.
“You can collaborate much more effectively when you join people who have done similar things,” says Manish Kothari, general manager of platform at Edmodo.
Slack’s rapid growth — it claimed 300,000 active users each day, double the number of three months ago — is partly an indication that workers need a new place to post and communicate about the data thrown up by many of these new applications, says co-founder Stewart Butterfield. This casts the company as the “news feed” of online working life, much the same role that Facebook plays in the consumer world.
The companies that become the hubs for this kind of activity are hoping to cast themselves as central platforms for working life.
LinkedIn, which styles itself as the world’s largest professional social network, could also be threatened if Facebook succeeds in connecting employees with people outside their company. However, the majority of LinkedIn’s revenue comes from recruiters, a market Facebook does not appear to be targeting. The site also does not offer collaboration tools or the ability to chat with colleagues.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, under Satya Nadella, who has made productivity tools for workers central to his strategy, is trying to make up for lost time. Much depends on converting users of Office on the PC into subscribers of Office 365, its new online service: once more of their data are held online, Microsoft will be better positioned to create new services around it.
A nascent “groups” feature in Office 365, for instance, makes it possible for teams of workers to join open conversations that sit alongside their familiar Outlook email inboxes.
Microsoft is also hoping to extract information from workers’ online documents, calendars and communications to create what it calls an “Office graph” of their most important interactions — an echo of the “social graph” that underpins Facebook’s network of personal connections.
The first applications that draw on this new trove of data have started to appear in recent weeks: they include Delve, which aims to show useful documents and information that is “trending” around fellow workers when their names are entered, and Clutter, a way to automatically suppress inessential email.
Services such as these are designed to keep workers from being drawn away from Microsoft by other new “social” services, said White. “If your tools meet your needs, you don’t need new tools,” she said.
Facebook will face other challenges as it looks to break into the world of work. The demanding security requirements of customers, strict rules about how their data are managed and the need to integrate with companies’ existing IT systems will all impose a heavy burden, said Rob Koplowitz, analyst at Forrester Research. “I’m not sure if I had a billion and a quarter users turning to me in their personal lives and the massive consumer opportunity associated with that, that I would want to slug it out in the enterprise,” he said.
But it is hard to argue with demographics. A generation that came of age using social networks and mobile messaging apps, rather than the Word documents and email used by their parents, is likely to exert a powerful influence over working life.
“If you look at the disruption that’s happened on the consumer [internet] side, you’d expect it to creep into the enterprise as well,” said Brett Taylor, a former Facebook chief technology officer who now runs Quip, another new collaboration service for office workers.
If Facebook’s plans bear fruit, the world of work, for millions of people, may never be the same again.
— Financial Times
