Microsoft's Office Live snares only 1 million users
For many companies, one million users is a big deal. For Microsoft, however, it's a rounding error.
As reported by The Register, Microsoft announced that it has managed to attract one million users from "schools, businesses and home[s]" to its Office Live Workspace Beta experiment, which allows people to run scaled-down versions of its popular Microsoft Office products online. For those skeptical of Microsoft's excitement at moving people off its lucrative desktop monopoly, well, you're right to be so.
Microsoft has little interest in a world without a strong desktop theme, as Techcrunch suggests. So, while it may trumpet "One Million Users!!!" for this Office Live Workspace Beta, you can bet Microsoft executives are internally crowing that the company still has something like 1,000 percent of the desktop market.
That's where the money is, until Google Docs and Google Chrome start to take a serious bite. At that point, and only then, will we see Microsoft make serious efforts to push this one million users to 100 million.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
