Hi Francois.

I hope you could cover how the evolution of documents will affect mobile. Dealing with documents tends to be one of the barriers to true mobility.

Thanks,

-Bob

Hmmm. Structured is an interesting attribute. Since I think much of good product design (and much of life, for that matter) consists of paradox management, I would love a discussion about allowing document creation to be both structured and ad hoc. And using "generic" document functionality in domain-specifc ways. E.g. Ad hoc documents with optionally structured meta-data, or even forms-like behavior.

Hi Francois:

Great topic... Sadly I can't join the panel... It overlaps with my Board meeting this afternoon.

It would be good to chat after the mobility session Friday morning if you can.

Interesting session — wish I could have been there in person. I'm old enough to remember when there were lots of office products (including Wang word processors with 8" floppy disks) — the market eventually evolved some 25 years later into a single predominant player. Now we're seeing an explosion of new web-based tools such as Adobe's Buzzword, Google Docs, Sliderocket (which feels very Adobe-esque), and dozens of other offerings. We know that in reality a document migrated from one version of software to another may not look exactly the same as the original, let alone a document migrated from one application to another. As we have discovered many times over, the best product doesn't always win; it's the guy with the best marketing campaign.

What assurances do I have as I enter the world of web-based apps that:

1. My data belongs to me and not to the company who owns the software and servers it runs on,
   
2. When venture capital runs out and the servers are turned off I'll be able to retrieve my data,
   
3. I'll be able to use that data in some other application.
   

Some folks are still afraid that GMail — in what is apparently perpetual beta — will someday have the plug pulled and years' worth of email archives will suddenly be lost forever.

Until there are some real answers put forward, I'm playing with a huge variety of web-based apps — a great many I have signed on, tried once, and decided never to go back; others I find intriguing and am doing further testing and experimentation. But I don't plan on switching my real-life production environment any time soon.

Indeed, great discussion we started in the panel on that topic. Maybe we can continue here?

One more question: is privacy of those documents a concern to you? Do you trust Google or others with all your professional documents and mail?