Could Office 2007 turn RSS into the next Pointcast?
I love RSS. I wish it were just a bit easier to subscribe to feeds (it’s getting better), but that’s a fairly minor quibble for the convenience I get once I do add the feed to my reader. But lately, my deja-larm* has been going off and I started to have these flashbacks of Pointcast.
For those too young to remember, Pointcast was one of the most successful “push technology” companies, and for good reason; their software was very user-friendly. Just pick the categories you want to get news for, and their screensaver would grab data from Pointcast and display it. It was not uncommon for entire corporate networks to crash around lunchtime when people would leave the office; the screensavers would kick in, and the ensuing flood of data would saturate the available bandwidth. Part of the problem was that since most homes were still on dial-up, people had to use Pointcast at work. Most companies ended up banning the software, and Pointcast died a slow death some time later. Pointcast was a victim of its own mainstream success and the eventual backlash, even if said backlash came from a source other than the actual users.
For the record, there were other technologies that tried to ride the push bandwagon, most notably the “Active Desktop” feature of Windows 95/Internet Explorer 4 that was just as useless for home users and too cumbersome for the workplace. Pointcast was superior in every respect.
Flash forward to today: RSS is how many tech-savvy people are getting their news fix, and while it’s not a true “push” technology, it’s close enough that no one really cares. Outlook 2007 is going to have RSS built-in (as is Internet Explorer 7), and these de-facto standards will open RSS up to the business world. I can see a time fast approaching where office networks will again come to a crawl because everyone’s Outlook clients are fetching the latest headlines from Boing-Boing and Something Awful. Could RSS end up banned from corporate America like Pointcast?
Probably not, at least, not for the same reason. Bandwidth is plentiful and even with people streaming radio to their desks, many networks don’t so much as experience a hiccup. If anything, corporations might find that RSS is a distraction from working, especially with it tied to the productivity tool that most people will tell you that they spend “all day in”. (Pardon my preposition.) RSS is such an effective information tool that I can catch up on pretty much all of my industry related news over morning coffee, but there’s a lot of outside influence there as well.
There’s also the potential that companies might find that the outside opinions of their business dealings to be a corrupting influence. Many smart companies are delivering news and information via blogs and RSS, but others might take the same tack as some telecommunications companies that ban web-based e-mail so that employees cannot send company secrets outside the network (never mind that the information in their heads can’t be corralled as easily). Could these companies decide that employees hearing information that they’re not supposed to be privy to is “dangerous” as well?
The cat just might be out of the bag. With Google offering RSS feeds via their own homepage, and many web-based solutions, it’s not as simple as blocking a single port. Companies would need to block entire domains including the search-giant Google, and that’s likely a losing strategy. That doesn’t mean that companies won’t try to find a way to create a walled garden for themselves. I think it’s entirely possible that Office 2007 (and specifically Outlook) could introduce a showdown between web publishers and corporations for the attention of their workers.
*deja-larm: The sense that something in the future is about to happen that will echo past events. Sort of a combination of déjà vu and Spidey-sense. Yes, to my knowledge, I made this up.
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