In his column, he echoes some of my suggestions:

5. Merge the apps. I have a dream, that someday the individual applications in Office will go away and, instead of using Word on some documents and Excel on others, I'll have a single app capable of doing whatever I need. Microsoft has this vision, too: They call it "Universal Canvas" and include it as part of .Net. Using XML, all types of data (word processing, spreadsheets, databases, slides) could reside in a single document format and be properly displayed to the user.

One thing this would do: Get rid of the pesky little interface inconsistencies that still exist among different Office apps. Those inconsistencies may be small (compare, for example, the way Word and Excel deal with wild-card characters). But for those of us who live in Office, they can be frustrating.

6. Make Office a platform for Web-services development. We hear a lot about how these new Internet-based applications are the wave of the future in computing. I'm not saying we should all learn programming. But I think people like you and me should be able to create active, Web-enabled documents using the apps we know without any special training.