> There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft.
I just don't see that. How exactly is Microsoft better placed than Apple or Google?
I just don't see that. How exactly is Microsoft better placed than Apple or Google?
With Microsoft 365 they took the Idea of Google Suit and integrated it in their OS.
Google tried it the other way and failed. But ultimately they are talking about the Chrome Book.
Well even beyond that. It shouldn't matter which hardware you use and this is brilliant; it's just not Microsofts Idea.
The Web is only one form of exposing those RPC endpoints.
So no MS is not the best situated to be that 'OS'. 1. It is unclear if such an OS (with the benefits and trade-offs) will be preferred to a world where cross-OS applications can abstract away the OS. 2. Someone like Google (minus their execution woes that seem to get worse in recent years) is better positioned to abstract away the complexities for a regular consumer.
Google Workspace is the main competitor, but they're not the front runner, they're second place.
Things like Apple Pages and Keynote are only used by a small fraction of consumers. They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
Because anyone who can create a great presentation would never think of things as "enterprise productivity solutions". They'd just make an awesome presentation.
If you're using Keynote to make an awesome presentation as a solo project, it's fantastic. If you're using it for enterprise productivity, it's a non-starter.
Getting signoff from a standardised process aside of course; any tool can participate in that.
Amazon is an interesting underdog here...
Google is moving in that direction (including hiring a former Office exec to run Workspace), in providing an integrated bundle. They're just behind, and have been fucking around with their chat, which is one of the cornerstones of the cloud platform.
As Thompson notes, Teams was built to be the "web OS" from the get go, not a Slack clone even though most thought it was one. In Thompson's view, the best players to try to be the web OS are chat providers (due to chat network effects) and cloud storage providers. You can already see Salesforce and Dropbox making moves in that direction.
To quote:
> This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
...
> Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically.
(me again)
Google, in theory, has the pieces to do it. But they're just behind in many ways - compliance, Microsoft's MSP network and sales staff on the ground, management tools, stuff like that. And there's the other question of "do they have enough at least mediocre things integrated together well enough" to make the play. They might, but not yet.