MattSnodBlog

I had my first real need to use Apple's "Find my iPhone" service, available through my MobileMe account (and now available as an app without the need for a MobileMe account).

After realizing that I had misplaced it, I roamed around the house with a cordless phone calling my cell phone. No luck. It was a busy morning, so I may have left the phone at either the gym, the bagel place, the dry cleaners, the Radio Shack, or the barber. I did not feel like retracing all of those steps, and then I realized I could just log onto my MobileMe account and have it find my phone for me.

When I activated it, I saw that it was still at my house but slightly off. Then I realized that I must have left in the car, which was parked two houses away. I told the service to send a tone to the phone for 2 minutes, along with a message that read, "Please give the phone to daddy." Sure enough, the phone was under the seat in my car. Must have slipped out of my shorts.

That service alone is worth the $99 a year I pay for MobileMe.

Another new version of Microsoft Office is coming out on June 15. While I don't think they could have really improved the art of typing a letter beyond version Office XP (or even Corel WordPerfect 5.2), at this point, it's just fine-tuning the user interface and tools. And perhaps undoing mistakes from previous versions.

One happy addition I wanted to mention has to do with PowerPoint -- the plastic spork in the utensil drawer of presentation software. Microsoft has finally decided to allow actual embedding of video files into a presentation. No more links to video files that get broken once you move the file or try to e-mail it to someone else. Apple's presentation software, Keynote, has done that since version 1. Apple knew then that people don't care that presentations are larger than 100 MB anymore. People have USB nail clippers that hold more than that.

Another welcome -- and inevitable -- feature is their offering of a free, lesser-featured, online version of Office. This is a direct answer to upstarts like Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword. Looking 10 years into the future, I think it's a near certainty that document management will be done via cloud computing of some sort.

The other late-to-the-table addition to the application line is the ability to create PDF files of your documents. As the New York Times's David Pogue put it, "Welcome to 2005 Microsoft!"

The struggle over the past 10 years for Microsoft has been the adoption rates of their new versions. More than 50% of Microsoft Office customers today are using a version that's at least 7 years old. People just seem to be happy with what works and aren't willing to shell out another $120 for a few new buttons. However, Microsoft predicts high adoption rates with Office 2010.