One of the interesting side-effects of Microsoft's lack of focus on security is that it may end up accelerating the loss of their Office monopoly. The current primary vector for the spread of viruse is the email. How I miss the days when you got a virus by physically inserting a floppy disk into someone else's computer? It made getting a virus similar to getting a real STD. You knew you did something wrong. You took a floppy put it in SOMEONE else's computer, it got infected with something nasty and then you put it in your machine. Coitus Floppyius.
Well now since the vector has changed to email, how has this impacted Microsoft Office? Well initially we were passing Word documents, Excel spreadsheets etc. Well those are served as vector for viruses. While the documents themselves might not serve as a vector, attachments do. So sys admins have been screaming that you should not click on attachments from people you do not know. The message then became, "Do not click on attachments." As the next round of viruses came from someone you know since once a machine became infected, it immediately emailed everyone in the address book.
How does this impact the Office monopoly? Well since Office has a desktop focused design, (it's really designed for a single PC user and producing pretty documents). It's not really designed for highly distributed, highly networked workforces. Because of the rampant spread of viruses via attachements, people have been told not to open attachments. (This doesn't change the fact that SOMEHOW people are still doing it).
People however, still need to collaborate on document production, and actually do work. It's still possible to mail attachements back and forth. Sys admins can isolate and then run antiviral software on the stored attachments. In fact this sort of quarantine is quite common in today's IT environment.
Passing Word documents served as a reinforcing function for the Windows monopoly. Clearly passing documents around this way is not the ideal way to do this. A centralized document respository, with versioning built in is the way to go. In all fairness to Office, it can indeed do this in all Windows house. On the other hand a Wiki can do this just as well, is web based and easily accessible by a distributed workforce and is completely virus free.
In fact a number of companies such as Jotspot have arisen to offer a replacement. Wikis can offer collaboration without the painful process of sharing Office documents. While the current state of wikis doesn't really focus on presentation on the same way Word does, it does focus on collaboration to a much greater extent which is the high value portion of collaborative work.
By forcing users away from passing random documents around to a more centralized document repository, the door is opened for another paradigm of document prep and collaboration. A networked approach doesn't reinforce Office, it undermines it. Of course the guys behind Office might well realize the power of networked collaboration as they bought Groove Networks to provide that magic grail of secure, safe, P2P collaboration.
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