The death of e-mail

This advances the ball in a roundabout way, capturing Web data for offline usage and allowing collaboration across enterprise domains. But weaknesses abound. Groove's transceiver offers no simple way of capturing Web data other than e-mailing a document into a space, and pointing at a single copy of data from multiple spaces tramples on the Groove security model.

This violates what Ray Ozzie calls the OHIO principle (Only Handle Information Once.) As Ray points out on his Weblog ( http://www.ozzie.net/blog/stories/2002/08/04/why.html ), "If information must be entered in two places, it won't be." And the SharePoint editing tool (aka Internet Explorer) remains a crippled subset of Word, Excel, and Outlook. Excel has already been updated, but we have to wait until Office 11 for real XML support in Word and Outlook.

This is clearly a job for what Windows czar Jim Allchin calls a first-class data object. It's the legacy of Hailstorm, a people-centric model where the data serves identity rather than the other way around. In a universe where documents are made up of the same underlying DNA (XML), e-mail, Word documents, and Outlook messages share a common data type with extensions appropriate to their unique tasks.

With identity as the base on which business logic is built, access privileges and the location of the data can be offered by the "sender" rather than pushing a message out. Instead of playing the digital equivalent of dodge ball with spam, we can now market our identities and barter degrees of access in return for services, products, or information.

So what's taking so long? Will XML make it easy for others to embrace and extend Redmond's crown jewels? On .Net Insecurity Day, Office czar Jeff Raikes suggested that "because of our resources, ... the extensiveness of our user base, and the popularity of our products," Microsoft could afford to make the investment "in the long term."

But Bill Gates hinted that won't happen soon, saying that if you went inside Office 11 "you wouldn't see a SOAP message crossing back and forth. There actually is a belief that in the long run things can be architected that way and there are people in Jeff's organization pursuing that approach, but there's nothing -- no requirement that forces us to do that in Office 11."

Meanwhile, I just got an e-mail from Mike Vizard: "We should do something around spam-fighting tools ...." Luckily, there's no requirement that forces me to reply.