What was behind the decision to add digital rights management to Office?
That's actually an outgrowth of an old group I had called emerging technologies, which had the e-book work. I saw the long-term potential in e-books, but I thought that if you could take the reading potential in e-books and the content security technology there and integrate that into Office, that would be significantly valuable to people for average business content. In Office 2003 and Word, you have the reading view, which uses the ClearType technology the e-books group was behind, and you have Information Rights Management capability, which actually got generalised into making them available broadly as part of Windows Rights Management Services.
Now, what we can do is offer customers the ability to set permissions on their documents. We're not trying to come up with something that's foolproof... It's a mechanism for people to express their intent. That's the way to think about it. If I send you a document, and you want to go over to a copy machine and copy it, you can do that. But if I set the permission to "do not print, copy or forward," I was obviously expressing something to you about my intent for how you would handle that content. In a business environment, given the incredible growth in information, the incredible flow of information that occurs, giving people the ability to express that intent is important.
Sun Microsystems and others have also suggested that it's also a way to lock out competing office applications.
I think that over time, there'll be mechanisms developed to encourage interoperability of security and authentication mechanisms... The primary thing we're doing is giving people the ability to express their intent with information. And I think that competitors like Sun say that because they have not yet been able to produce that kind of value for their customers.
A numbers of Web services providers are counting on Office support to encourage adoption of their services. Was the client side part of what was missing from Microsoft's early Web services offerings with .Net?
I don't know that it was missing from the early vision there... Office 2003 is in our view the first and best example of how end users can benefit from XML. Part of the point is to not make that an issue. The user shouldn't have to focus on XML; the user should be able to do something that's important to them. The fact that it's XML that does the plumbing is something we don't feel needs to be made the focus for the user... Programmers do XML.
Now that you've begun this broad effort to establish Office as a platform, where do you go next?
We have to always be focused on understanding what we can do to improve information worker productivity. What's next in doing that? Certainly, you can see us making significant investments in areas like real-time communications and collaboration -- Office Live Meeting, Office Live Communications Server. Certainly, we're making big investments in what Longhorn will make available to customers. That's the next step, and I know it'll be a big step forward.
