Microsoft Shows Up at The Digital Publishing Party

As has been highly documented in the blogosphere, Microsoft has teamed up with the NY Times to debut a product called Times Reader.

Times Reader will take advantage of some of the coolest features built within Vista, including the abilities to rescale pages, font and styles on the fly and the ability for advertisers to include rich-media content, resulting in a more robust reader experience. Some of these features show that both the Times and Microsoft are coming from the same philosophical standpoint as we are here at NXTbook  — how best to repurpose (and ideally optimize) print content for a rich-media experience online. You can bet we’ll be one of the first to sign up for Microsoft’s SDK when it becomes available and see what features can and should be integrated into the NXTbook.

That being said, we couldn’t help but notice a couple bullet point from the presentation that are in stark contrast to what our publishers have been telling us they want. Specifically:

• The Reader component will ship with “high volume Vista” licenses.
• The Reader component will run on computers running Microsoft Vista.

Two of the first questions we receive from virtually all customers are:

• Do I need to download anything to view your product?
• Can a NXTbook be opened on any computer?

If you read the two questions we hear most often and juxtapose them with the two statements listed above, you can see there’s an immediate quandary at hand. At this point, publications created for viewing in the new Vista tool will only be viewable on computers with not just Vista, but the high-volume version of Vista. And while there certainly will be the option for others to download the Reader, this forces the person to add software to their computer (an option which often doesn’t fly in the corporate world, where the bulk of our b-to-b customers read the NXTbook).

If you take these points and add them to the fact that the corporate world is notoriously slow at upgrading their versions of Windows, you’re left with the likelihood that it will be some time until we could use the upcoming Microsoft “solution” and be able to answer our customers’ first two questions in the affirmative.

All of that being said, we’re thrilled that Microsoft is dedicating the resources to improve digital publishing and are excited to see what the next few years will bring.