Sean Ammirati: Today on ReadWrite Talk, I have Eric Gilmore, a senior product manager for Office Live at Microsoft.

Eric, thanks for joining me today. And to start out, could you give an overview of your role at Microsoft and the Office Live service? And one of the products we’re going to talk about today is the Office Live Workspace. So how that fits in the Office Live?

Eric Gilmore: Sure. So I’m the senior product manager in the office business group and I have the responsibility for Office Live Workspace. And we’re talking about product management at Microsoft that’s really setting that marketing strategy and how we’re going to market and then really working with the product team on how we evolve the product over time.

Sean Ammirati: Cool! And can you talk a little bit about for people who aren’t familiar with Office Live Workspace, what it is, and how it fits in the Office Live?

Eric Gilmore: Yeah. Office Live Workspace is a service. It’s free. You can go to officelive.com to register for it and it’s really for every single office user out there. It’s really to optimize for that experience. You know, there are really three aspects to it.

One is getting people access to their information from anywhere, whether it’s a PC or Mac. The second is enabling, kind of, an easier way to share and collaborate with others. And the third is really to extend that office experience. So people have lots of different versions of office and we want to make sure the service extends that experience to web. It really brings the Web to them.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. So being part of the Microsoft Office product but a free service within it, at the end of the day, what are your goals for Office Live Workspace? You know, what would be a win for Microsoft at the end of the day if the product got a certain amount of market share or how do you evaluate success of this product?

Eric Gilmore: We’ve seen a lot of frustration with people. You know, one of the areas we’ve seen is people emailing themselves documents all the time so they can get access to it. And it’s a frustration that lots of users and lots of people have to deal with.

And part of that service is making it easy that, kind of, put that document or information in Workspace and then they can access it from any computer. There are millions of people around that have to deal with that kind of challenge or frustration. We also see examples of when teams collaborate.

So, you know, if you’re a student and you’re in a marketing class and you’re working on a project together, typically there’s a lot of different versions of files flying around and then someone gets stuck having to merge those version changes. And again, it’s a pretty common scenario that we see, is frustrate the people. And with Office, we have over 500 million people that use the product.

So we think these online service will really help people in those two areas I mentioned and, you know, the upside for that is help millions of people.

Sean Ammirati: So do you think this is a way to attract new Microsoft Office users or more of just to make sure you retain the market share you guys have? How are you guys looking at it inside of Microsoft?

Eric Gilmore: One of the biggest opportunities is really again to give value and help out the 500 million people who use Office.

But there’s certainly people that, you know, whether using Mac Office or some other product, that can take advantage of using Office Live Workspace. It doesn’t required Office. There’s, you know, some great features. Whether it’s the WebNotes example, you can share information. It doesn’t have to be an Office document and you can still benefit from that.

So the market potential is much larger than Office users, but we certainly see that the Office user will certainly benefit a lot from it.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. And then transitioning from, sort of, how it fits in the Office, who do you view is the competition for Office Live Workspace?

Eric Gilmore: For me, the competition is kind of the de facto standard for collaboration today, and that’s email. So no matter what you’re using for email, whether it’s Hotmail or Exchange, you know, any time you do an attachment, I think it’s a frustrating thing for people. It’s not the right version, there’s lots of different files that are flying around, and it’s too difficult to manage.

Our number one competitor is really changing people’s behavior to make it easier to share information and access that information. And that’s really the de facto standard today, the email.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. Obviously, there’s other people who, I think, are trying to make collaboration happen outside of emails as well. And one of them would obviously be the team at Google doing Google Docs. We had a writer at ReadWrite Web, Sarah Perez who’s relatively new on here at RWW and doing an awesome job. She wrote a pretty detailed comparison of Office Live Workspace to Google Docs.

And after going over, I think, like a 10-feature comparison, her conclusion was “although it’s very close when it comes to basic features of the two services, each stands out on its own way. Google Docs, although limited in capabilities, offers real-time collaboration. Office Live Workspace on the other hand may not have the collaboration features of Google Docs, but the Workspace feature is unique plus you have the capabilities of full-feature offered software available assuming you own it.”

Any reactions to that? I mean, you see collaboration coming down the road. The real-time collaboration coming down the road in Office Live Workspace. You think that’s not as big deal as she raises it? Obviously, she’s also very complimentary, so I think she got that. So what’s your reaction to that?

Eric Gilmore: Fundamentally, our approach is quite different than, I think, Google. You know, our approach is in software and service world where I think how do you bridge the gap between the rich client applications in your desktop, so many people take advantage to the Web.

And fundamentally, people, they want to have that and we need to be able to build software and services for people like myself and you who maybe more tech-savvy and people like my mom who, you know, are basically just starting using email for the first time and share photos.

And how do we bridge that gap so that my mom can take advantage of scenarios where she can access documents when she goes from home to work, which is important. Fundamentally, I think we’re trying to get people the best experience no matter if it’s on your phone, on the desktop, or on the Web.

That’s kind of our strategy where I think others in the space really angled where people behaviors, "Hey, we have to go to some URL to take advantage of the Web and do Web productivity. And we’re actually bringing the Internet and the Web to people and where they work right in the context of the rich client app. So if you’re opening up a Word doc, you can save it immediately to the cloud.

And even if you access it from Office Live, you can easily work on that document with Office. I think that’s really what people want. You know, you look at some traction that some of our competitors have gotten. It’s quite small. It’s quite niche. And I think one of the advantages I think Microsoft brings on the table is how can we scale this kind of capability to millions and millions of people. And Office Live Workspace is really the first service that’s in this area. And you’re going to see us, which we’ve already showed, is we’re going to rapidly improve it.

We’re going to listen to people. We’re going to add features as quickly as we can. And I think we’re going to see a lot of cool, exciting things to come in the next few months.

Sean Ammirati: Let’s talk a little bit about that. What are the ways that you’re proactively listening to people and sort of driving the product road map?

Eric Gilmore: Something unique, I think, with the Workspace service is that it’s a great experience for Microsoft developers because they can have both, you know, kind of own thinking about where the product should go, but they can involve the community. And also at workspacecommunity.com, it’s kind of a place where we can take questions, listen to folks, have them actually prioritize the features for us.

And then it’s quite a great process to see internally at Microsoft where we’ve got, you know, the development team and marketing kind of collaborating and say, "Hey, we think these are important people." And we also take that community feedback very seriously. I mean, to the point where, you know, a dev actually piped up a couple of weeks ago and said, "Hey, I saw on the forum that, you know, this is really important to somebody."

Example was that the multi-file upload was a really important thing. And that literally that feature went right on top of the list and we built it in less than a few months just because of the community aspect to it. So you’re going to see a lot of cool things coming out and it’s a great month I think for Microsoft to build in services that we can listen to people, we can iterate fast, and improve the experience.

Sean Ammirati: Yeah. I saw the forms. Did you say that they’re voting on features as well?

Eric Gilmore: We, kind of, categorized some of the top feature requests. So we do not only surveys to the base of people that are starting to use the service, but we also have forms where people can add feedback. We tried to consolidate that and say, "Hey, here are the top places that people find. We need to investigate different scenarios or specific feature requests." And then there will be a voting capability that will be out in the community group where to actually prioritize that these are the feedbacks.

Sean Ammirati: Interesting. That’s very interesting in terms of how you guys are building features on top of it. One of the things is I think interesting about, a lot of these Web services too, is how Web services interact with each other. At this point, are there any non-Microsoft Web services interacting with Office Live Workspace? And I guess as a follow-up to that too, what is the best way for that to happen going forward, do you think?

Eric Gilmore: Well, today, there are no, kind of, partner opportunities outside Microsoft that you’ll see Workspace exposed yet. Fundamentally, we look at the Office Live services at platform. And certainly in that, we build a lots of other different products and an ecosystem about adding value to that partner community. So certainly, we look at Office Live Workspace service to open up those APIs over time and really expose some really cool things.

For example, something that’s a very small thing. But it’s internal that now when you go to live.com and you sign up with your other live services, you can see a Workspace is right from that homepage and you can access them with one click. So that’s a little bit of a preview of where we see opening up a lot of APIs for partners to build on things and for anyone who need to integrate with other Web services. But we think it’s a fundamental part of Web development service approach that we have.

Sean Ammirati: And so you touched on this a little bit, the Live homepage. And I guess to be honest, I don’t 100% understand the Microsoft Live brand, I think. So as a product manager of one of those products, I was curious what do you want people to think about when the term or the brand "Live" gets associated with the product?

Eric Gilmore: Well, I think that the positive things with the "Live" word associated with Microsoft is a lot of things that, you know, are called unaided, kind of come out.

You know, people think of that as a service. They think of it as, you know, it’s an Internet-based thing. You know, these are kinds of the things that come out of that. So that certainly is what Live means when it’s associated with product. There’s usually an online component or Web-based component to what we do in a live world, how it accepts the part from other things they come out with.

The live world is really about individuals. It’s about giving people great services that compliment, you know, their existing applications, whether they’re rich client apps or they’re Web services, and they’re kind of consistent with everyone’s use of that.

So with Office Live, it’s about every office user and giving them a great extension of the experience of office, but online. And we have another kind of nomenclature service we called ‘Microsoft Online.’ It’s really about organization. It’s about giving and hosting exchange or host a SharePoint for organization and having them take advantage of service capability.

When we think of Live, it’s all-user managed. So the content is all about me. All the services is, kind of, I control my company or my organization I work for really don’t control live services. That’s kind of the piece that’s important. And typically, live services today are free, so they’re free online so they can take advantage of that.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. Well, that’s actually helpful, for me at least. So hopefully, that was helpful for the audience as well. So let’s step back for a moment and go outside of Microsoft and I have a couple of more questions for you around that. So as you think about, for lack of a better term, Enterprise 2.0 applications, these sort of things that Office Live generally fits into. First of all, what are the things that excite you most about that trend on the web?

Eric Gilmore: Well, I talk a lot to CIOs and other businesspeople and enterprises.

And I think they’re really grappling with trendy term of consumerization of IT. They’re seeing this kind of wave of really innovative Web 2.0 application sinking into the enterprise. And quite frankly, they’re struggling with how to deal with them. Do they embrace them? Do they shut them down? And I think there are significant challenges they have to deal with: Security, privacy, manageability, a lot of the core things that IT professionals care about.

When we look at the problem they have to deal with, a lot of times, we get the question, "Do you guys support Workspace being in the enterprise?" And I absolutely respond, "We love it. We hope people use it." If it goes in the enterprise, it’s a great thing because typically it’s solving frustration or pain for those employees. And today, a CIO and IT pro have to deal with consumer email being the biggest leak in information outside the firewall.

And we look at Workspace as providing a great collab experience, whether it’s ad hoc collaboration or not, if you don’t have something like SharePoint where there is a lot of that security and privacy manageability aspects to the infrastructure. So we think it’s a bridging aspect. It’s better than email. We think it’s a great ad hoc collaboration. It’s free.

So for people that don’t have VPNs or a way to access the corporate information, when you go home at night, they can certainly use that in security of using Office Live Workspace. So I think a longer term, Microsoft sees a way to bridge the gap between the Live ID world and the Active Directory world. And we’re working on a lot of different stakeholders, whether it’s new institutions or enterprises, they figure out what that balance is. Should a person see SharePoint site in Workspace or should they be able to see Live Workspace in SharePoint?

What does that balance between the two? It’s something that’s kind of interesting, though.

Sean Ammirati: So, Eric, do you see a lot of the adoptions for these tools as you’re out there talking to corporations being driven by the IT department or one of the things I think that’s interesting is, oftentimes, I think a lot of innovation can be driven by the business unit itself too?

Eric Gilmore: Well, I think the demand when using the consumerization IT, I think IT would say that the end-users or their employees are actually starting to use it and starting to request it in the enterprise. I think that’s the challenge of being an IT person. You’re trying to help your customers which are employees.

And if you can’t solve their pain, you’re going to get a lot of angst and people are going to turn to other things. So certainly, it’s that kind of demand. And then there’s a certain demand of CIO embracing web 2.0 technology and saying, "How can I take advantage of these things?"

Social networking or business productivity or any of the elements that some of the innovative Web 2.0 companies have been pushing the envelope on, they’re certainly looking at the space saying, "How can I benefit from that in my enterprise?"

Sean Ammirati: I mean, obviously, you’ve talked about more of them. The fact that the service is free or that it’s something that I can put on their, you know, corporate American Express Card, it sort of changes the equation of how these things are being deployed conceptually that I’m curious if it really is in the real world as well, you know, those or if those products are really being led from the IT department.

Eric Gilmore: I think the frustration is — and you make a good point — like if you democratize the decision down to the individual person and they can make a decision themselves with tools they use and it’s cheap enough, then certainly you have this challenge. At least the IT people have this challenge.

What I think other companies don’t have the ability to do, which I think Microsoft does, is be able to once maybe a service gets traction. Let’s say that a smaller company starts using Workspace across the organization, you see a lot of benefit in it, but then eventually gets support when they need something like SharePoint and more of the feature set that SharePoint delivers.

How do they on ramp that? I may agree that question on time like it’s great if you start to organically come out, but help me, Microsoft, bridge the gap and actually onboard these things into my company. And how do we do that?

And I think we have the fundamental pieces in place to be able to help IT do that while I think other companies really don’t have the broad skill set or the footprint to be able to do that.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. So just to paraphrase this back to you basically then if I’m understanding right, the thing that you’re doing is people would start using Office Live Workspace. Probably it’s just an end-user whose IT department probably gave them Office on their laptop.

And then at certain point, there’s a critical mass of users and then the IT department drives and in your case SharePoint and those type of services then provide some additional benefits at that point?

Eric Gilmore: Yeah, correct. Think of it as onboarding so you could think of what we would call ‘ad hoc collaboration’ happening in an organization. And at some point as you said it reaches a critical mass where people are saying, "Wow! There’s a lot of work being done. There’s a lot of content for the organization being done in a Workspace."

And how do we bridge that gap and onboard that content with more rich content, management tools, and security manageability that SharePoint enables? It’s kind of like, how do we bridge that gap? And today, we certainly don’t have a solution for it. I think we’re listening pretty intently to IT as Workspace gets used more broadly and serving out, what are the features? What are the scenarios that are important that we need to build things around?

Sean Ammirati: Okay. Interesting.

Eric Gilmore: And the one thing I just want to clarify. I think if you look at the intent of the audience for Office Live Workspace, there’s two core audiences I think when you look at it. One is we call information workers at Microsoft that is anyone that uses a PC at work. It’s kind of our segment and it’s about a hundred plus million people in the U.S.

And then the other audience that I think we care about a lot are students. And I think we care about them for a lot of different reasons, but it’s really cool because they’re kind of a proxy for pushing technology in the limit. They’re connected that using Mac and PCs, they’re always apt in trying these things and we spent a lot of time in the education space. We’re learning from students and schools to be able to use Workspace.

Sean Ammirati: Yeah. I imagine there’s some amount of them bringing that with them to the corporate market, too.

I was actually at an event last night. And the CIO of PNC Bank, which is a regional bank where I live, was saying that they’re recruiting these students from colleges and then giving them a desktop computer and saying, "take notes on paper." And the new hires were like, "What are you talking about?"

Do you see that for the Microsoft products like Office Live Workspace? You’re hoping it will be pushed up through these students into the enterprise as well?

Eric Gilmore: Yes, I mean, I think I would say that students are a proxy for future information workers. So just like you said, they get hired from college to companies. They certainly are kind of a leading indicator of how productivity is changing and I think what trends they expect. You give a good example like when a person shows up today at work, they expect to have a laptop. They expect Wi-Fi.

They expect you ought to go from conference room to conference room and not have to plug in, right? So those are things that I think are taken for granted. And certainly, companies are involving their idea of structure to support that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I agree with you.

Sean Ammirati: Just to pick up on that for a moment more, I feel like some of the stuff that this sort of collaboration and some of the things you are talking about. Do you get a lot of interaction on these community forums from your student user base as well?

Eric Gilmore: It’s a variety of audiences. We’ve spent some kind of face-to-face time with students all around the country in different universities. And whether they’re community schools or big institutions, I think we’ve got a lot of variety of feedback. So some come online, some actually come from focus groups. A couple of weeks ago, I was at the University of Washington with some students just talking about web productivity in general and things like that.

So we tried to get as much information as possible to include it in the product.

Sean Ammirati: How similar are their request in general to the first information worker audience that you talked about earlier?

Eric Gilmore: There’s a couple of things, but I think they get concepts quite quickly. So doing something online they’re very familiar with, they can go to different audience that might create a document. Whether it’s offline or online, sometimes there’s confusion about where is it. Is it online? Is it on my desktop? Do I have to save it back down?

Experimenting with new ways of working, I think, is much easier for a student to accept and embrace than let’s say in an older information worker who didn’t grow up with the Internet or is very familiar with the tools that they have for a while. And changing behavior is much more difficult, I think.

Sean Ammirati: Okay. So just one last question here to wrap it up and this is completely now getting you to take off here in your Microsoft hat for a moment. So I’m curious. Just as a Web user yourself, it’s obvious that you’ve seen a lot of these Web properties. What’s the most interesting or the most compelling non-Microsoft Web property to you right now and why?

Eric Gilmore: So I’ve been a fan actually quite some time of Flickr. I think Flickr has done just a fantastic job for a number of things. I mean, their approach to how they develop the service, the innovations they’ve had, just photos in general for people in the Web and there are just commitment and continuous commitment for innovation.

I mean, just pushing the envelope. One of the service I was checking out the other day was being able to see where people are taking pictures in the world and geolocation services. It just brings the whole new level of the community aspect of things.

Very, very powerful. And I think they have done a very elegant job even on the API side and opening up as a true Web service. You know, one of my favorite features is the work that the Windows Live team with the photo gallery where I can actually import my photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery and, with one click, upload all those pictures to Flickr.

And I think that’s a cool way. Microsoft kind of leveraging the value of Flickr and kind of the whole S+S (Software plus Service) model, but it’s just fantastic. I can share photos with my mom and everyone can see the different trips I go on and stuff, so I think Flickr is doing a fantastic job with that they’ve done.

Sean Ammirati: That’s a great answer. And I’ve got to say as somebody at a company who’s trying to acquire the company who owns Flickr, that’s an excellent way to answer that question. But I don’t disagree at all. I think Flickr’s an awesome service, but it struck me when you answered that. I’m like, "Wow! He took the Yahoo! property!" That’s interesting in and of itself.

Eric Gilmore: It wasn’t that intentional.

Sean Ammirati: Yeah.

Eric Gilmore: They have done a lot of great work. I mean, I think Yahoo! definitely acquired them for a reason. So I think they’ve been even been impressed with how Yahoo! just to give you the length of weight of the value of Flickr that Yahoo! didn’t change it to Yahoo! Photos.

Sean Ammirati: Right.

Eric Gilmore: The integrity of the service and the brand, let’s say from the creator, is still present in the service today.

Sean Ammirati: Oh, I agree and I think it’s a great answer. Well, Eric, I really appreciate you taking some time to talk to us today and we’ll get this up soon.

Eric Gilmore: All right. Thank you.