Microsoft Office finally faces real challenges
By Arnold Zafra
Microsoft Office is finally facing real competition. Google, Yahoo and another long running rival of Microsoft in the office application arena, IBM have all unveiled their plans that may directly or indirectly hit on Microsoft’s domination of the office application arena.
Google released the final component of its online application suite, presentations - a direct competitor of Microsoft’s PowerPoint. The release of Google presentation completed Google’s triumvirate of paid-for-software product, which also includes Docs and Spreadsheets and is now ready to battle it out with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint office application products.
Yahoo on the other hand is beefing up its webmail product and acquired Zimbra, a fairly new company which specializes in AJAX-based email. With Zimbra’s acquisition and Yahoo’s current email product, Microsoft’s Exchange and Outlook may be facing competition soon.
Lastly, Microsoft’s long standing rival IBM has announced the release of its new office application suite called Symphony. Symphony was developed under IBM’s proprietary corporate software platform, Lotus. Symphony is a free desktop application suite consisting of document processing, spreadsheets and presentation software as well.
Analyzing these events, Salesforce.com’s co-president Lindsey Armstrong told the Times that internet-based applications are the way to go for business and that companies are “tired of maintaining the stack of software that major companies are forcing on them”.
“They want innovation, not infrastructure - why bother with costly implementations when you can subscribe to business applications in the same way that you do for other utilities like water and electricity? It’s the end of software - the tides are changing and Microsoft is losing its hold,” she said.
Microsoft did not buy Armstrong’s statement about the end of the software.
Darren Strange, senior product manager for Microsoft Office said that Microsoft believes that the future is more about software plus service rather than software-as-a-service.
“There are some things which thick client is better at than - offline use being a big one,” Strange told the Times.
Microsoft is not resting on its laurels and is continuously developing its Office application suite, which has been the company’s major money maker for decades now. Planned develops include more collaboration and web 2.0 features.
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October 30th, 2007
Office Live Workspace is another interesting development I’ve been commenting on recently - we are making it easy to collaborate online making best use of the PC and the web.
October 31st, 2007
The Office Live Workspace announcement is also interesting as we create on online collaboration tool closely tied in with the desktop apps.