Forgive me for starting with a caveat, which means a mild disclaimer rather than an outright warning.
I may not know exactly what I’m talking about today.
So, you ask, why is this day unlike any other day?
I’m going to offer a brief look at the way Microsoft’s long-awaited Vista operating system and the companion upgrade of Office called Office Live will look and feel when they finally reach consumers early next year.
They will look a lot like your Web browser. The colors and the way icons, folders and files look will be different, and the biggest thing you might perceive is how when a mouse arrow rolls over something, that item will be enlarged as though under a small magnifying glass. Information floats above telling what one can do with whatever is highlighted.
This is something you can now see with stuff like, of all things, the free Picasa photo software given away by Google, Microsoft’s latest archfoe.
Google’s stunning arrival as a provider of search, home pages, mapping, text chat, audio chat, video blogging and even Web-served applications clearly forced Microsoft to abandon earlier plans for Vista and Office and to turn the whole ball of wax into an Internet-centered universe.
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If you fire up Word in Office Live, for example, the word processor will link with your account at a massive Web site called OfficeLive.com and the panel on the far right now used for the Help functions will be filled with a number of applications ready for your use.
In my test of a beta version of Office Live, I was surprised to see that the software took over my current version of Office 2003 and changed things so the commands like File, Edit, Format, etc., pointed to my new Office Live Web space.
That Web space becomes the heart of each user’s computer environment. You sign up and get started by creating your Microsoft-hosted Web site with plans ranging from free for limited features to maybe $30 a month for the Lexus version.
The Web site becomes the place where you find your e-mail, calendar, contact list and, depending upon what you are doing or what kind of business you have, a series of task-specific Web-based applications await your summons.
These amount to a deep reservoir of tools as diverse as Excel spreadsheets for accounting and setting up a serviceable customer support site for a product complete with FAQ, to schematics, Contact Us forms, and so on.
The applications get presented in a feature called the Dashboard and are one of seven master categories built into the Office Live beta now being tested by selected users, particularly in big business but also ordinary folks. I got selected as a beta user by applying at OfficeLive.com along with other customers rather than in a role as a journalist.
I must say that it’s been a delightful customer experience. It starts with acquiring an Internet domain name along the lines of Yourname.officelive.com and using template-based site builders to create a page.
This site builder model is common among nearly every Internet service provider, and I found Microsoft’s offering extraordinarily nimble.
The plan I used (temporarily for free) allows for 50 different e-mail accounts at the Yourname.officelive.com site and all e-mail is administered there where users have access to things like a group calendar and a “work space” where each person can do whatever it is that person is set up for.
The interactive stuff gets done through a beta version of the Microsoft Messenger IM panel that will allow video conferences and, for consumers, connections to all of Microsoft’s moneymaking schemes like Microsoft’s Rhapsody-driven music store, eBay, CNBC and other advertisers.
At the civilian and workforce levels Microsoft will use so-called shared folders that are accessed through the MSN Messenger; they let one drag any kind of file into a folder that the other person can open and download contents.
It’s all Microsoft and all MSN all the time. Users sign in and operate through accounts with the Microsoft Passport system that stores an e-mail address at Microsoft’s sites like MSN or Hotmail and allows automatic sign-on at many Web services.
Imagine going to work and using a Web browser not just to do entry work like documents and numbers but also to talk to colleagues. Bosses and customers could use everything from e-mail to IMs to PC to PC telephones to converse, and they could arrange video conferences through a cheap Web cam.
Tech historians should find delicious irony here since Microsoft took over the world by decoupling our desktops from a central mainframe, bringing new powers and freedoms to individual users. Now Microsoft leads the way to a model where the mainframe is replaced by the Web and once again we all must be connected to get stuff done.
As they say in French, the more things change the more they are the same.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.