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Microsoft Office has huge market share – an estimated half a billion users, according to this interview with Microsoft manager Betsy Frost.

But it’s difficult to compete with free applications offered by well established Web software-as-a-service providers. Today, Google announced its web-based slide show application. This wasn’t a surprise. I mentioned Google’s office apps on 19 April and 23 February. These web-based apps don’t have all the features of Microsoft software, and Google doesn’t support third-party plugins. Plugins are software that hooks in to Microsoft Office applications to provide additional features.

When does free beat market share?

But web-based apps do allow users to share documents online, instead of emailing versions of documents. There are security concerns, of course. Google’s applications are tied into the company’s single signon (SSO) authentication system. Google does offer corporate and educational versions of these services, but storage is centralized in Google’s massive data network. Google isn’t offering a database product, but one could argue that the entire Google office suite is really a vast database full of XML-formatted documents and messages. Corporate customers pay Google US$50 per seat each year for the web-based office applications and email. I haven’t seen how Google controls document sharing on academic networks, either.

Web-based office software is becoming a key success factor for the largest Internet search sites. Email, calendar and address book applications are a logical offering. In most industries, companies must use email, but it’s often cheaper to let someone else run the servers. According to the New York Times, Yahoo just purchased Zimbra, a developer of web-based email services. Zimbra’s annual pricing is reasonable: $28 per seat for corporate customers. Universities pay $1 per student account, and $8 per employee account. At those prices, more universities are outsourcing their email systems. I discussed Google’s academic email services on 11 April. Of course, Yahoo is the dominant webmail provider with 181 million unique visitors each month. Google has only 18 million.

The New York Times reported today that IBM will launch its own downloadable version of Sun’s open source office suite. Users still have to install the IBM applications, so the versioning problem still exists.

But IBM is offering its software for free. Oddly enough, IBM resurrected the Lotus Symphony brand for this product. Of course, IBM is offering technical support for corporate users, but not for free.

In the past, I’ve posted links to articles in the New York Times in this blog. I read the Times’ web site several times a week. I got into the Times Web habit in 1995, actually. It beats waiting for the Sunday Honolulu Advertiser to reprint dated, abridged versions of the same articles.

There was always one problem with linking to the Times – their archiving policy. After two weeks, most recent Times news stories shifted from free access to subscriber-only access through a paid service called Times Select. Launched in 2005, Times Select was a bold revenue play on a web site that currently attracts 13 million unique visitors each month.

Authoritative news has its price

When I pointed users or students to a New York Times article, I wasn’t asking them to subscribe to the Times or buy the article. Readers didn’t like paying US$50 a year to use the Times archives. Yes, print subscribers received a free Web subscription, as did some educational subscribers. The Times also determined that more Web readers were following links from Google, Yahoo and other search engines to Times content. If the user wasn’t a Times subscriber, they might not see the Times content or ads.

Keep in mind that advertising helps subsidize much of the alleged “free” content on the Web. The bandwidth required to connect users to a web server can be expense at times. The servers, programming, and other services required to keep even a small web site going cost money.

Advertising, in turn, helps fuel electronic commerce. It’s far less expensive for an electronic merchant to advertise online, especially when the ads can be targeted to specific websites, users, and geographies. Customers who will consider an online merchant are more likely to read their news on the Web in the first place. It’s expensive to convert readers of print newspapers or television viewers to an online business model.

I run ads at the bottom of my site’s web pages more as an experiment than anything else. The revenue that I receive is laughably small, but I don’t pay that much for my web hosting at DreamHost, either. Google announced today that it is expanding its advertising business to mobile platforms, and other Web advertising services are moving in the same direction.

In the end, management determined that the Times would be better off without its subscription service, letting these readers read stories for free while viewing advertising sold by the Times.

Free the content – sell more ads

The Times announced today that Times Select will end tomorrow. Web site visitors will get free access to sections of the Times’s news and column archives, including the last twenty years. BoingBoing and Kaaawa blog iLind.net ran a quick mention of the change as well.

The Wall Street Journal may be the next major news daily to free its Web content. The Journal’s subscriber-only policies were more expensive and more restrictive than the Times’. The Journal are also one of the few newspapers that made money from its Web operations– at least US$50 million in subscriber revenue each year, according to this article in ZDNet. New owner Rupert Murdoch is already pushing MySpace towards targeted advertising based on user profile data, according to this NY Times article (via BoingBoing). I would not be surprised if the Journal and Dow Jones changed their business models.

School’s back in session, and my email traffic now includes messages from my students. I receive hundreds of email messages every day. Most of these messages are unsolicited commercial email (UCE or spam), and Gmail does a good job of keeping them out of my inbox.

When students ask me why there’s so much writing in my courses, I usually ask them how many email messages they write every day.

Writing well is an important skill for managers. A well composed email message can help get decisions made.

It’s always good when I can look at the subject line of the message and understand what the student needs. A descriptive subject line is a big help for the recipient.

It’s also a good idea for students to put their course number in the subject line. I’m teaching two different courses this term. I check my email several times each weekday, and I often use my phone. I can’t always pull out my course roster to determine the course for a specific student.

Here’s some examples of good subject lines:

• Due date for IS 6100 paper 3 assignment?
• Where are IS 7010 grades posted?
• Could you read my draft for IS 7010 Paper 2 by Thursday?

Sometimes, email senders are pressed for time, and they don’t include a meaningful subject. I’ve done that myself. Emails that have no subject line at all are easy to overlook. Some spam filters may be set to classify these messages as spam.

Here are some examples of poor subject lines:

• Your course
• My paper
• Please help me!
• I have a problem
• WebCT doesn’t work
• TurnItIn.com help!
• Question about the assignment

What’s wrong with the above subject lines? The messages may be urgent, and the subject lines may have been composed in a rush. The subjects aren’t specific or helpful. The sender wants the recipient to take a specific action, but the subject lines don’t provide any guidance.

Of course, some senders just use the reply button instead of the address book to generate a new message. That message might have nothing to do with the original message’s topic. Because it’s a reply, the subject line gets some additional prefixes like “Re:” or “Fw:”. It’s a good idea to restate the subject line if the message has changed topics. Otherwise, the recipient may assume the incoming message is about the original topic.

Unfortunately, sometimes my spam filter misclassifies student emails, and a message winds up in the junk mail folder. A good subject line will help the recipient identify messages that went through a spam filter and generated a false positive.

It’s never, ever a good idea to include a student ID number in an email subject line to an instructor. Student ID numbers are the kind of data that an identify thief wants to grab. Most of the time, the instructor doesn’t need to know the student’s ID number.

Here’s a few links about writing a great email subject line:

• Wired (via BoingBoing)
• BlueFlavor has an earlier version of the Wired article.
• Email Labs: 15 rules for writing email subject lines – this article is focused on writing email newsletters, but some of these ruls apply to any email message.
• ExcessVoice

Every semester, I get at least one student who asks about the paper submission process in TurnItIn.com. Paper 2 drafts are due on Wednesday in IS 6100 and Friday in IS 7010.

I discussed this issue in this 29 January article.

The short version: When users press the “submit” button to send an assignment to TurnItIn.com, the web site retrieves the document from the user’s computer. This process is similar to uploading an attachment to a web-based email system like Gmail or Yahoo Mail!

TurnItIn.com refreshes the web page and displays an unformatted, text-only version of the uploaded paper, along with a second submit button.

This confirmation step should help users determine if they uploaded the correct file. TurnItIn.com does let instructors limit students to a single upload on an assignment. But some users get confused because their paper is displayed without any formatting at all!

I’ve always believed this was a usability issue that TurnItIn.com’s software and user interface designers should fix. The only reason I can think of is that TurnItIn.com management wants to reduce the response time during the submission upload cycle. Generating an image or PDF would increase the time needed to submit a paper.

I usually allow students to upload their file as many times as they wish before the assignment deadline.

DWIMNWIS = “do what I meant, not what I said”

TurnItIn.com does send a digital receipt via email to the user after a successful submission. But I’m not sure this confirmation message is enough. TurnItIn.com should always display a PDF or graphical version of the formatted document. Students who use Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, or almost any other Mac or Windows-based word processor usually keep their software in a layout mode that supports WYSIWYG, and displays the actual fonts, margins, spacing, and other document attributes.

So I’m not surprised when some students expect TurnItIn.com to display a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) version of their paper with the formatting and graphics intact. If I hadn’t used TurnItIn.com before, I’d probably ask the same question!

I did a little maintenance on this site today. A few of my new students asked if my posts from the spring term would help them on their fall 2007 assignments.

My answer: “not really”. I tend to change my assignments around each term to keep the content current, and to include suggestions from students in my previous courses.

I’ll continue posting suggestions during the current term, but I’ve restricted access to many of most of these old posts to keep the confusion to a minimum. Students usually don’t get access to a previous semester’s discussions in WebCT, after all.

As I reviewed my blog, I counted 57 posts that were specific to the spring term and no longer relevant.

In some of these posts, I had published suggestions or guidance that was specific to an assignment. Of course, I’ll keep doing this during the current semester.
In some cases, these posts were progress reports on my grading. Those progress reports aren’t relevant for my current courses.

A few of the posts were agenda’s for a face-to-face section I taught last term. Both of my sections are online this term.

I didn’t want to delete these old posts, however. Every now and then, I show colleagues what I’ve been doing in my course.

So, if you’re a student who’s searching through the site for information about my spring 2007 courses, you might encounter article titles that look like this screen shot: