Online Office App Pileup!
Well I guess there’s a battle for the next generation Office Suite. Google opened a crack in the armor of Microsoft’s monopoly cow, it’s office suite and now everyone wants a piece of that proverbial pie. Google’s piling more and more in there with a word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, mail and now even presentation applications. Microsoft has responded to this threat with the odd, but understandable Microsoft Office Live Workspace (catchy name!). And, inexplicably, Adobe has thrown it’s hat into the ring with it’s purchase of Buzzword.
Google’s offerings are compelling because they have enough features to be useful to a lot of people, they are ubiquitous (as long as you have net access and a reasonable browser), they are free and they make sharing documents very, very easy. Microsoft has come into this market purely as a defensive move. They’re office suite monopoly is a sacred cow to them and they are fighting, for the first time in a long time, a battle to preserve it. It isn’t in any danger at this instant, but the writing is on the wall, people are looking at alternatives and there are some reasonable ones.
Initially it seems odd for them to come out with an online service that requires you to already have Office. It seems to fly in the face of what an online service is. But you have to understand, for them to come out with a real online application suite would actually be competing with their own office suite. Now, if they’re Apple, they have no problem cannibalizing their own products with better ones. Better to keep the consumers in the family. But, they aren’t, they are deathly and irrationally afraid of anything that might touch their Office money. That includes actions competitors might take and actions they themselves might take.
So if you’re Microsoft you have to view this problem as one where the Office suite itself needs to be the competitor, not some new product. So you’re kinda hamstrung there, but hey, it’s bringing in zillions of dollars every year so you know, I guess they do have something to be worried about. So, for them the main advantage of Google’s offerings are the sharing and the ubiquity. They come at that with their own spin that gives them some of that while at the same time preserving the sanctity of their desktop clients and in fact making it a sales pitch to sell even more. You can share them and people can read and comment them online, but hey, wouldn’t it be great for them to be able to edit it and get in on the fun? Buy a copy of office!
Realistically at this point, everyone still buys Microsoft Office and most every desktop has it. So, they’re adding many of the benefits of Google Docs and hopefully keeping folks from migrating off their platform. They may not, necessarily add any consumers with this but what they’re trying to do is defend themselves from anyone defecting to Google’s platform. Like I said, it’s a defensive move.
Ultimately, it won’t work. If Google is going to be successful, this move isn’t going to change anything. It may prolong the inevitable, but if people want a true online platform and Microsoft isn’t working on one (which they may well be) then this stop gap measure just won’t save them.
As for Adobe, it’s the classic, we’re competing, we’re competing syndrome. They’re losing their focus on their core competency by focusing on competing with their perceived competitors. Why would anyone look for an office app from Adobe? Especially when it’s just a word processor? This is just stupid and we can all wait for it to hoepfully die before it’s birth. Then Adobe can get back to working it’s core strengths.
October 10th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Trying to throw MS Office out of the Enterprise, even before Google came along is damn near impossible. I’ve been trying for years to migrate away from them to something Open Source. Pre-Google the reason was solely user comfort (fear of change) and the fact that there was no alternative to Outlook if you are an Exchange email shop.
Most often the CFO and other Execs who would green light the move away from the MS Office Suite are also the ones who *live* in Outlook and are terrified at the thought of moving away. Our CFO came to our company 3 years ago and handed us 2 DVD-R’s with 5 years of PST files to load into the system.
Fast forward to now: Google Apps for the Enterprise is a GREAT product for SMB, in both functionality and price. Its not a slam dunk right not because I think the whole apps-as-web-services thing is still too new for much of the general user-base.
I find Microsoft’s reactive attempt to compete laughable. They really don’t know how to innovate anymore, only try and find strategies to continue to protect their revenue stream without major value add to the customer.
Its the same crap as their response to Virtualization…VMWare is going to start shipping their ESX hypervisor stuff embedded into major server OEM hardware as a chip. This is *huge*.
Microsoft’s response? They say when they do *finally* rollout a virtualization product that its going to “always run on top of some form of Windows”. Why bother. By then VMWare will have a monopoly on the virtualization market and Microsoft’s solution will be nothing more than just another crappy Windows Server app because they CANT let the customer NOT buy their OS to run it on.
October 15th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Michael, I agree with you - getting Office out of the enterprise isn’t happening any time soon. But it may, just may happen if MS keeps making missteps and other companies keep the pedal down.
You’re also right about apps as services being too new. The problem with it is that you get nothing if your internets are down, as they may frequently be for a SMB and losing not just email but office apps is probably a real problem for companies. What they need is something like a more intelligent Gears that is constantly on and syncing when online so that you don’t actually have to take it into offline mode, it just knows.
Yeah, we’ll see what MS can actually do. It takes them awhile to get moving these days, but maybe they’ll see the light and start doing things right… I kinda doubt it with Ballmer at the top, though.