At its SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas this week, Microsoft laid out its vision to make Office 365 a more intelligent collaboration suite via new social interactions, APIs, and machine learning capabilities, along with other goodies. 

Core to the announcement was Oslo, an upcoming application designed to tap into the new machine learning capabilities of Office 365, called Office Graph, that allows the program to understand the connections between people and documents.  This is a social networking graph for your Word documents or PowerPoint presentations, which I assume will be connected to some central cloud service that makes and manages these connections.

Office365 continues to show its age as just the next generation of Office.  Microsoft is running out of tricks for these office productivity tools.  That’s why you’ll see more announcements like this around features that we don’t really need.

I, for one, do not need an office automation package that can make links with other people or perform machine leaning.  Heck, I just need something to make my experience when I create, edit, and manage documents as easy and as productive as possible.