HR Geek: (Product) Strategy for the Rest of Us

(Full credit to Rich Zippel for many of the ideas below, which came out in a discussion we had earlier this week and to Lew Tucker, who mentioned a few of them at the CTO all hands this morning.)

I've been thinking about how OpenOffice might be enhanced by its connection to Cloud Computing and how integration with the network might be additive to the productivity tool experience. 

The obvious first step would be storage.  With a link to the cloud, you could easily build in a "save to the network" button, leveraging the storage cloud as your primary home directory. 

An online version of the tool running in the cloud is certainly possible (see GoogleDocs, Zoho, ThinkFree, etc.).

How about a hybrid desktop and cloud experience?  I spend a fair bit of time dealing with obscenely large spreadsheets.  It would be great to leverage the compute infrastructure of the cloud to enhance the speed at which large re-sorts, format changes, formula updates, and macros are executed. 

And how about allowing direct data links to cloud-stored data?  Rather than run a report, run analytics against it, and then (a day, a week, a month later) get a new data set and start over, why not link directly to the data source?  This would be particularly useful for things with additive data (more records today than there were yesterday), especially if you could define where the data joins and how the formulas interact with new data.

Going a step further on the storage side, how about treating individual presentation slides like songs?   The presentation is then a playlist of individual slides from any number of presentations.  Building a conference presentation for Cloud Computing could mean pulling slides from the EVP, CTO, Marketing, and Engineering lead decks into a coherent flow.  The cloud would then apply template, page numbers, and other formatting and spit out a document in the format of your choice.

For that matter, how about printing and publishing plug ins which leverage the cloud for execution?  For example, print to the nearest Kinkos; publish as a web-presentation (e.g. to slideshare.net); post a web link to a wiki or other site; etc.

My guess is that these are just the beginning of what we might accomplish with a hybrid (or fully web-based) productivity tool.