Google was born on the Web and is increasingly giving Microsoft fits by forcing the decades-old software giant to compete on Google's terms. Like open source. Like cloud computing.
Microsoft may shore up its fortunes in the short term with a successful Windows 7 launch. But in the long term, its very success with outdated "desktop" products threaten to cede the market to Google.
We'll have all of it, please
It's not really fair to Microsoft. Microsoft is a victim of its own success, needing to cater to its existing clientele with each new release, in true "Innovator's Dilemma" fashion. Hence, Microsoft continues to make a lot of money, but its last two quarters have seen traditional strengths like Windows become a drag on earnings as enterprises spend more money with Google, Red Hat, and others.
Google's lack of legacy frees it to innovate rapidly and broadly, as Genentench CIO Todd Pierce, a Google Apps customer, suggests:
The rate of innovation at Google is - well I mean, the Oracle, SAP and Microsoft product cycle is five years; Google's product cycle is five days. It's incremental. In five days you're not going to be able to cancel your Microsoft Office license, but in five years, you won't have Microsoft Office.
Microsoft, for its part, is so concerned with "backward compatibility"--"Is this product/feature compatible with our ability to continue to monetize our 1980s-style desktop monopoly?"--that it continues to struggle to embrace the Web. CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg points out that Windows 7 should have been Microsoft's launchpad to cloud computing, but isn't.
There are a lot of "should have beens" for Microsoft when it comes to the Web.
Meanwhile, no one is slowing down for Microsoft. Let's stick with cloud computing for a minute. VMware dominates virtualization and has a strong claim on cloud computing, though open-source rivalry from Eucalyptus and VMops threatens to challenge both VMware and Microsoft as they seek to dominate cloud computing.
And then there's Google, which provides an increasingly wide array of cloud-based services to enterprises looking to untether themselves from the desktop. In an interview with CNET News, Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that "The browser can be both enterprise- and consumer-capable. The architecture is driven from the browser. That is the story of enterprise IT today."
In other words, the desktop is simply the means by which a user loads a browser. It's a gateway. The value is not in the desktop anymore. It's in the browser, which is the new desktop, in terms of real functionality delivered.
Microsoft's big opportunity to stymie the threat from Google and others is SharePoint. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has described it as Microsoft's new operating system, but it's in a recent interview with Forrester that he makes this meaningful:
In my own mind I compare (SharePoint) to the PC, the PC started off life as a spreadsheet machine, then became a programming machine, a word processing machine, (SharePoint is) a general purpose infrastructure that connects people to people and people to information....
I think SharePoint is considered a very serious development platform for rapid application development (by IT architects and developers).
SharePoint is Microsoft's best attempt to connect desktop applications like Office with centralized, cloud/cloud-like collaboration and storage. Yes, Microsoft has other initiatives like online Office, but none marries so well its legacy profit centers with future innovation. And, given that SharePoint is already a $1 billion and frenetically growing business, it has momentum that other initiatives don't.
SharePoint, then, may be Microsoft's best hope for marrying its legacy to the future of Web-based computing.
Microsoft needs something like this. It is losing in mobile, and not simply to Apple. Google's Android momentum is almost astounding, with AdMob data pegging Android smartphone penetration in the U.K. at 10 percent, as but one example.
If we assume that mobile will increasingly be the client platform of choice, then we see Google squeezing Microsoft from the top (cloud) and the bottom (client).
In both areas, open source is Google's weapon of choice, and it's one that Microsoft is going to have to figure out quickly if it wants to be a player on the Web. The Web is too big for Microsoft to control it, and the Web is overwhelmingly open source, as Lotus founder Mitch Kapor states:
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the Web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
All of the servers, pretty much, they run Linux as the operating system; they run Apache as the basic Web server on top of which everything else is built. The main languages out of which Web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the Web is open source ... the Web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
Kapor further suggests that Microsoft's war with open source is over, or should be over: open source has won. It's essential infrastructure now, and hence something that Microsoft needs to embrace, not fight. This isn't about open-source religion. It's about pragmatism. Pragmatism that Microsoft, like anyone else, can embrace.
Google is using the future (open source, cloud) to compete for the future, and its tactics threaten to hit Microsoft in its profit centers like Windows.
Microsoft, however, appears to be mired in its past. Windows 7 looks to be a serious upgrade over its Vista predecessor, but in 10 years time, will we care? Or will we have moved on, forgetting about those quaint days when we used to care about the operating system and applications like Office?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
While Microsoft Office is actively used by roughly 50 percent of U.S. Internet users, according to a 2,400-strong survey administered by ClickStream Technologies, 5 percent of U.S. Web users also actively use the open-source productivity suite OpenOffice.org.
Importantly, ClickStream wasn't measuring installations. It was measuring use. The company actually installed client-side software that tracked which applications the users were running. To have OpenOffice in use across 5 percent of U.S. Internet users is pretty amazing.
How many people does this translate into? According to recent data, there are 303 million people living in the United States, 72.5 percent of which have Internet access. This suggests that of a population of 219 million U.S. Internet users, nearly 11 million actively use OpenOffice.
In other words, OpenOffice is not a niche geek phenomenon. With more than 46 million downloads of version 3.0 alone, OpenOffice could prove unpleasantly disruptive to Microsoft's desktop business.
True, 5 percent U.S. market share doesn't sound like much, but an estimated 11 million people interacting with OpenOffice on a daily basis sounds like an incredible beachhead for much broader market penetration.
More than a decade ago, Microsoft won the office productivity suite war against WordPerfect, and arguably, Office has seen little innovation since.
Just as Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker has argued in the browser market--namely, that once Microsoft had beat out browser competitors, it failed to innovate for years--so, too, has Microsoft rested on its Office laurels for far too long.
Enter DocVerse, a stealth San Francisco start-up created by two former Microsoft employees that aims to make Microsoft Office operate more like Google Docs, as reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. DocVerse provides a 1MB plug-in to Office 2007 that enables online-document collaboration.
As ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley points out, this functionality is not actually new. After all, Microsoft, too, is offering similar functionality in Office Live Workspace.
However, as DocVerse co-founder Shan Sinha tells Foley, Microsoft's efforts so far leave much to be desired: "Office Live Workspace doesn't provide a feature set that comes close to what we offer, making it a poor user experience (and in our estimation the cause for its lack of uptake)."
I'll go one step further. I don't think Microsoft's heart is in its Live services, and it won't be until it is forced by the market to take the cloud more seriously. Microsoft makes billions of dollars every quarter on its Office product: stodgy, offline Office. It's not going to touch that revenue stream with anything that might jeopardize a cash cow.
So it makes sense that Office innovation will happen outside of Microsoft. Unfortunately, DocVerse is going to find out that innovating on a closed platform is likely to be an exercise in frustration. Microsoft owns Office. It therefore owns the types and scope of innovation that can happen on the platform.
Even so, it's good to see innovation in Microsoft Office again--even if it happening outside of Redmond.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Apple may be the poster child for showing the industry how to compete effectively with Microsoft, but the company isn't free of Redmond's long arm just yet.
Despite spending years, and millions of dollars in research and development, on its own suite of productivity software, 77 percent of Mac users stick with Microsoft Office, according to a TechFlash report.
I love my Mac, but I couldn't use it without Office. In this, I'm sure I'm not alone, which must give Apple pause whenever it celebrates its rising Mac market share.
Perhaps this is why Apple is releasing a SharePoint-esque knockoff designed around its Pages and Numbers programs, taking Microsoft head-on in document collaboration.
The strategy won't work. Until Apple actually starts winning market share with its iWork suite, it won't matter if the five or six customers who actually use it can collaborate with each other.
No, to end Microsoft's latent stranglehold on its Mac market share, Apple needs to do one of two things vis-a-vis office productivity: go disruptive with a Web-based offering in the manner that Google has, or invest deeply in OpenOffice.org to make it a viable, rock-solid enterprise competitor to Microsoft Office. The first path leads to Mountain View (Google). The second? To Menlo Park (Sun).
Regardless of which path Apple takes, at some point, it must address Microsoft Office. Yes, people could just run Office in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, but that really only deepens its dependence on Microsoft.
What do you think Apple should do? Or does it matter?
Microsoft is apparently going to support Firefox and Safari with its upcoming Office Web Applications (and, hence, Windows alternatives like Mac OS X and Linux).
Yes, those using Internet Explorer and Silverlight will have an enhanced experience, but this is an exceptional step forward--and smart business--for Microsoft.
But what does it mean for Red Hat?
Yes, Red Hat. I'm not suggesting that Red Hat's desktop business is threatened because today it doesn't have much of a Linux desktop business. Red Hat has chosen not to compete--at least, not much--on the traditional enterprise desktop.
That's not the point. The point is that if Microsoft succeeds in stepping beyond its closed ecosystem and opening up its technology to alternative platforms like Linux, Firefox, etc., it will eventually disrupt Red Hat's Unix and Weblogic replacement businesses. Today, Red Hat can clean up the wreckage of these overpriced and over-engineered markets. Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow becomes much more difficult if Microsoft outmaneuvers Red Hat by broadening its appeal beyond Windows.
Microsoft, in other words, is on the offense, not defense.
Not that this is the first salvo. Microsoft's patent-plus-interoperability deal with Novell is paying dividends for Novell, as The VAR Guy points out, and hence for Microsoft. That deal was Microsoft's way of painting a bulls-eye on Red Hat.
... Read more
Havoc Pennington has long been one of the pioneers of the Linux desktop movement, and a primary GNOME developer. Once at Red Hat, now at Litl (cool name, by the way), Havoc should be the poster boy for Linux desktop advocacy.
Nope.
In a recent blog post, Havoc rubbished the idea of anyone needing a new (traditional) desktop:
GNOME 2.0 and KDE 4 are bad models for change. They rewrote and broke the code, but from a user-goals perspective, they are the same thing as before. We shouldn't feel bad; Windows Vista made the same mistake. Nobody cares about Vista, because XP allows users to accomplish all the same goals. Even if Vista didn't have a bunch of regressions, nobody would really care about it.
The fact is that people already have a desktop. They don't want a new desktop from GNOME, from Apple, or from Microsoft. Making another desktop does not add anything to the world. On average, people who have GNOME want to keep it, and the same for the other desktops.
I agree. I've long argued that what is needed is not Yet Another Desktop, but rather a novel conception of what "desktop" means. Microsoft won the desktop war. Time to move on to the next battle. It's not about Vista or GNOME. It's about what "office productivity" means and where I do it.
Hint: Not in Office.
OpenOffice.org Ninja has posted an interesting analysis for anyone who has found themselves complaining that OpenOffice is slower than frozen honey on a frozen three-toed sloth's frozen right nostril.
The spoiler? It's getting slower all the time.
OpenOffice.org is generally getting slower with each release. However, some parts of OpenOffice.org are getting faster, the performance losses are relatively small, advances in new computer hardware are more than making up the losses, and OpenOffice.org continues to mature with new features.
I'm not sure if this is supposed to count as advocacy for the open-source productivity suite, but it hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement. Of course, there's more to this report than immediately meets the eye.
... Read moreWith Apple doing so well of late, it's only fair that it's starting to share the wealth, this time with Microsoft, which has seen sales of its Office for Mac 2008 program triple the sales rate of its previous version. For those keeping track, that's the highest rate in its 19-year history.
Microsoft, however, struggled to credit Apple with the success. You really must read the PR contortionist to appreciate it:
"Of course, Mac sales continue to be strong. That alone, though, isn't sufficient...And you know, I think it's just a really great product, so I think those...things all went together.
Well, I agree that it's a great product. But come on, Microsoft, the sheer volume of Mac sales must have a lot to do with the sale of the product. Just say "Thank you" and be done with it.
IBM is now giving away its Lotus Symphony product for free. Not "free" as in open source, but rather as in "Please take since people won't pay for it," as only a few hundred thousand downloads have been registered since September 2007.
The gesture is intended to take away money from Microsoft - probably a losing cause going head-to-head on Microsoft's territory - but also to provide a platform upon which to sell IBM's collaboration software. This second strategy has a better chance of success, but would be much better off it didn't first require enterprises to adopt Lotus Symphony because, quite frankly, they won't.
A much better route would be to a) extend from Microsoft Office (though this is fraught with problems because Microsoft controls the platform) or b) shift the battle to new terrain that Microsoft doesn't own, as Google has.
If I were a betting man, I'd lay my money on email as the disruptive platform that IBM should build upon, and I don't mean it's widely used by hugely clunky Domino/Lotus Notes combo. I mean Zimbra or Mozilla's new email push.
... Read moreOn the assumption that not everyone reads comments, I wanted to post a comment here that was made in response to my earlier post on Live Documents. Net net: Live Documents is much more interesting than I had originally supposed. In fact, I just registered for an account. Here's why.
Is Live Documents simply a competitor to Microsoft Word? No:
[W]e offer the entire Office suite - online equivalents of Word, Excel and PowerPoint - and not just Word as you have mentioned. If it was only Word then yes, many of your points on create vs. collaborate are true but it is far more complex when your data is in a spreadsheet or presentation.
What about the limitations inherent in being a pureplay SaaS/browser-based model?
...[W]hen we say that we are an "online" Office suite, we are not limiting ourselves to just a browser-centric experience. While we do offer a browser-based service that offers functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, we also offer a client application that makes your existing version of Microsoft Office web-enabled. ... Read more
