Jeremiah Owyang, ex-Forrester analyst and now with Altimeter Group talks about:
Microsoft Makes Work Fun: Office Launches “Ribbon Hero”, A Social Game. If like me the title piques your curiosity then click through to see what Jeremiah is saying. The whole post is well worth the reading. But a few salient points:
In an effort to make learning fun and increase usage of Microsoft
office products, they’ve launched a pilot program called “Ribbon Hero” (read blog, or watch video).
Much like a game you’d find on Facebook, Ribbon Hero lets users of
Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other office applications score points by
unlocking challenges –then touting it to their friends.
Microsoft staff creates ‘challenges’ in the software, and encourages
users to play to learn. As users unlock challenges (see screenshot
above) they can earn up to a max of 300 points per product, and can
choose to share their scoring with their Facebook friends on the Fan page.
My oh my, how the world is changing! Jeremiah makes good points but then he also reminds us that games can be...gamed. I thought the best response came from Mark Littlewood who said in comments:
Dude, interesting again but just wonder whether you might miss one thing. Not everyone gets this new Web 2.0 stuff. Just had a session with some (UK) CFOs.
Very suspicious of 'the cloud'.
Do everything in Excel.
LOVE playing with spreadsheets.
http://thebln.com/2010/01/cfos-love-a-spreadshe...
Maybe they need their own game?
Cue Simon Hurst? And please do check out the cloud poll on the right hand side of the front page