antipopper

Having recently set up my Mac again from scratch, I’ve made a decision to avoid Microsoft products: Mail.app under Panther is now fast enough to replace Entourage; Microsoft Word files can now be opened in Mellel (the multilingual wordprocessor I used to set the Farsi version of the Temporary Protection Visa guide); PowerPoint files open in Keynote. And now that I’m running a small business (eeeeeee!), I guess I’ll have to find an Excel replacement.

The ease with which I’ve ditched Microsoft Office indicates much more than the work of people creating equivalent products, though. Besides the availability of these products, I ditched Office because I hardly used it anyway — besides Entourage, there wasn’t one single office app that I used every day. Tech commentators have been worried for years about the lack of innovation in the desktop arena, but perhaps this arena is relatively stagnant because the very idea of the monolithic desktop office app is past its use-by date. Like a lot of people these days, I’m increasingly using a lot of small tools: I write in VoodooPad; I blog in Ecto; I read news in Shrook; I instantly message in multiple protocols using Proteus. It’s a bit obvious, but all of these desktop apps involve networked documents or packets of information, rather than discrete, standalone documents, which have become less and less important to me. The “office” model is disintegrating.