Within hours after writing about the fact that “It’s Time for New Office Tools,” I got an e-mail from a CIO who was in violent agreement with my perspective. When I asked if I could publish his comments, he agreed as long as I withheld his name and that of his company. Here’s what he had to say:
“Bruce,
Good column on the need for more useful office applications.
The functionality that I think is most required is a tool to help severely multitasking people stay organized. For example, in my role (CIO), I have to track information about a zillion projects, issues, tasks, problems, requests, notes, questions, suggestions, and ideas. I have things that I need to do, and things that I need to make sure that someone else does. I also have a lot of information that I better be able to quickly find when necessary. Outlook/Exchange task management is a joke. The right tool needs to be seamlessly integrated into Outlook so incoming and outgoing messages get logged to the appropriate place.
I raised this issue to Ballmer, which led to a detailed discussion with one of the lead MS Office architects. I don’t know if they were just being polite or actually considered what I was suggesting. I think the need is real.
I actually developed something a couple of years ago that I use on a daily basis. It was a good start, but the program is quite limited due to the limited time I have to work on something this ambitious. If Microsoft or Google would put some serious developers on this sort of functionality, they might just have a home run. I think there is a lot of professionals, like myself, that struggle to stay on top of so much stuff on a daily basis.
Your column did bring back some memories from the past. NBI was always my favorite company name. At least they had initials that really meant something!”
In reading the CIOs letter, I especially liked his last line about NBI. If you knew the Boulder, Colorado firm, you know that the acronym stood for “Nothing But Initials.”

