Microsoft’s Biggest Miss
minimalmac.com
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In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
Is there honestly any real competition in that field from tablets and iStuff and the like? No. Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, but work is done on a desktop, where you need to do a lot of typing and clicking. The interface is simply better for that.
Moreover, Microsoft Office has pretty much nailed its niche: I challenge you to find a better office suite. Here's what you'll have to do:
1. Find me an office suite that works out-of-the-box.
2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email, database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet, simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
3. Find me an office suite that does (2) fairly well.
4. Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
There's some nifty stuff on the net as thin clients running in HTML5. There's some cool stuff happening in tablets. But the author is sorely mistaken in presuming that the world has somehow moved past Office.
EDIT: And yes, I've tried Google Docs and OpenOffice and WordPerfect and all these things--but for raw "get the bidness done" Office is pretty much it.
EDIT2: And Word's spellchecker could've saved me. >:(
> The assumption underlying this whole article is that you
> don't "need" Office to do work. That somehow iStuff will
> fill in your missing productivity suite. This just isn't
> backed by reality.
> 2. Find me an office suite that does everything (email,
> database (Access lol), word processing, spreadsheet,
> simple programming, presentations) for a flat fee.
Microsoft has convinced folks that they need one suite that does all of these things. This is patently not true. For example: I can use GMail, Keynote, Basecamp, and RTF documents to do everything I need to do, with heavier publishing-style stuff in Pages. If I need to interact with folks using Office, iWork has never failed to fill in that role.
Just because you're stuck in Office-land doesn't mean you have to be.
I don't think that it would be a terrific stretch to say that any business outside of programming/webdev/design/etc with greater than 90% certainty uses Office.
Hell, a few years ago on one of my professional engineering exams I had a section devoted to macros in Excel. Just because we know of and use other tools doesn't make our experience the norm.
(and for what it's worth, I do my note-taking on gmail, my typesetting in latex, my math in octave, and my presentations in libreoffice...and still use Office at work because--hey, guess what--that's what I know is the common denominator for everyone)
The point of the article (also of my comment) wasn't "Nobody ever needs Office again" or "nobody uses Office anymore." That's silly, of course it's used. And it's not a bad product.
So a lot of businesses use Office. Great, we've established that point. But more to TFA's point: a lot of folks can get by fine without Office. You and I already knew we could avoid it. But now, folks who used to rely on Office are buying iPads and Macs (for instance) and getting productive things done without Office, whereas before they might not have realized they could do that.
Do you use all of these only on the iPad or the iPhone, including Pages?
Microsoft Office basically doesn't satisfy this requirement itself.
I get frustrated with LibreOffice not importing files correctly, but then when I went to an Office 2007 to attempt to import an Office 2003 file, I found it was also failing to import correctly there.
The .doc format is such garbage that they can't even manage to import it correctly in their own software reliably.
I don't say it's not possible at all, but extremely unlikely.
Maybe my lawyer has a really old version of Word or something and he keeps sending me files in an old format that isn't supported as well.
I've also had a lot of files opened flawlessly by LibreOffice; it depends on how many features you're using. Maybe you're trading documents that aren't that complicated?
You see, it is the word processor for all the non-techie people out there. They have no idea how to properly use it (and pc's in general), so they blame Word for all their faults.
LibreOffice, on the other hand, has much more competent userbase (in average), and despite the lack of certain features LibreOffice has more positive image.
If there are no detailed Word error messages or diagnostics, perhaps you could ask your lawyer to send you a PDF or paper version, so you can tell if there are any differences.
I for one would be very attentive to the possibility of missing or incorrect information in legal documents...
One document went back and forth between Word and LibreOffice and the numbering was always screwed up. Instead of:
1. 2. 3.
...it would come in:
.1 .2 .3
No actual missing information. Just screwed up formatting.
I prefer LibreOffice when I need to open old files -- the format is often botched, but all the content is always there -- which was not my experience with Microsoft Word.
Also, in my experience LibreOffice will happily open documents Microsoft Office complains about as being corrupt.
If Microsoft would have had an app for the Touchpad, he would have bought it, and wouldn't have seen how overpriced and over featured it was for his needs.
This is a crack in Microsoft's armor, and could lead to long term issues.
Microsoft is right in waiting for things to settle down before wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on such excursions. Do you know there they aren't already working on Office for the iPad? After all, they seem to be actually bundling Windows 8 ARM tablets with Office applications.
This is branding.
"Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code." I am aware of that - my father doesn't give a shit. He wants "to download Office". I know it takes a lot of time and investment, but even if they released a subpar editor that was able to view it, they would have got his money and I highly doubt he would have complained.
"Porting it to webOS is a laughable proposition with the amount of devices it sold." I agree, and I understand why they wouldn't. My point is that they lost a recurring customer by not creating it. Think of it similar to the police response to a bank robbery. I can guarantee that the cost of the response is several orders of magnitude greater than amount even in the bank, let alone what the thieves are actually able to steal. That is because they are not reacting to the cost of the money being stolen, but to the long term costs of making it seem like anyone can rob a bank. If Microsoft made an App for EVERY platform, regardless of cost, it would be hard for anyone to even penetrate into the marketplace, therefore ensuring longer term success.
Secondly, Microsoft loses over 2B a year with Bing. They are a huge company with very deep pockets, and I highly doubt hiring a few dozen swissarmy programmers would make much of a dent comparatively. Theirs is not a finical issue, but one of leadership, and culture.
"And calling it an 'app' is disingenuous, it's a full fledged suite."
Agreed, was only done for the sake of brevity. Easier than writing "an office app, a powerpoint app, and an excel app"
"Do you know there they aren't already working on Office for the iPad?" Yes, several /years/ after its initial release, despite making up over 90% of the tablet market. Docs to go, a fully featured suite, was released within a couple weeks.
"After all, they seem to be actually bundling Windows 8 ARM tablets with Office applications." Not sure what you mean, iPad !== Windows arm tablets. And again, everyone expects Windows software of windows hardware. The discussion at hand is Windows software on non windows hardware, which is how they made their millions to begin with.
Unquestioningly bend to the capricious whims and desires of non-technical users, a winning strategy for any tech business.
Last month a user told me I should add full-fledged accounting and payroll management to my niche software so he doesn't have to buy QuickBooks. Better get cracking!
Microsoft is not a niche software company. They dump billions down holes every year for completely fruitless projects. They could have easily bought dataviz, called documents to go Office Mobile, and called it a day.
I don't think shareholders would appreciate MS throwing money at every platform at launch.
>Secondly, Microsoft loses over 2B a year with Bing. They are a huge company with very deep pockets, and I highly doubt hiring a few dozen swissarmy programmers would make much of a dent comparatively. Theirs is not a finical issue, but one of leadership, and culture.
That is because the search market is huge, whereas Office software for a tablet that only sold when it was a final firesale.. not so much.
And if you think porting Office to a tablet can be done by a few dozen swissarmy programmers... I am sorry. Even HP didn't make a office suite for it for launch.
The "Office" market is huge, as well. And they like what makes them money. I am not saying they should do this on every platform, I am saying that they risk losing customers with every platform that comes out that they do not have one for. While my specific example was the touchpad, the same argument applies to the iPad and Android markets.
"And if you think porting Office to a tablet can be done by a few dozen swissarmy programmers... I am sorry. Even HP didn't make a office suite for it for launch."
HP didn't make the touchpad, Palm did. Palm was not an office oriented company, they were a device oriented company. Secondly, Docs to go does it regularly, and has done it for over a decade. Again, this is not about bringing over the codebase to new platforms, it is about branding a product with similar functionality on every platform.
1. Google Docs.
2. Gmail, Google Docs [Free]
3. Google Docs
4. Google Docs can preview / edit. You just need internet.
I haven't used office in ages. I consider myself a fairly early adopter of technology and yes I've moved on. My mom has not, I don't think she ever will.
It's like mobile phones made wrist watch redundant. But people still wear them for:
1. Luxury.
2. Habit.
Seems to satisfy the privacy requirements while keeping the more maintenance heavy components on their machines.
Tablets won't replace the desktop/laptop. Augment, sure, but they aren't going to kill them off, especially in the workplace. They're different devices with different functions--it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven.
Google Docs is great for consumption, sure, but for creation it's so-so (especially compared with better, dedicated tools), and there's no guarantee it won't be sunsetted when it ceases to help funnel meat into Google's advertising maw.
Great analogy. Unless tablets grow in terms of connectable peripherals, I can't imagine secretaries, programmers, accountants, or anybody else spend 8 hours staring down their desk on a 7" screen poking fingers at a virtual keyboard.
Connecting to peripherals is irrelevant in the tablet takeover. In fact, tablets are irrelevant in the tablet takeover. What's going to happen is that the tablet OS and app ecosystem will reign while the form factor becomes whatever is convenient for the task at hand.
Media consumption? Tablet. Work? Unknown form factor, but with correct input/output attached and running the same software as the media tablet.
Things is, what platform is going to be the best at switching modes between desktop and tablet, with full support for multiple monitors, printing, VPN etc, stuff business will like? Windows 8.
Maybe it's better the way it is. Maybe having a machine for "work" and machine for "play" is how we keep things intuitive, modular, and clean.
Granted, writing music in GDocs isn't a common use case, but advanced formatting is the way of business. If Google can't get it right, they can't get business right.
Haven't we had this discussion way too many times before? How many HN stories have there been of "look at the feat of content creation this person pulled off with an iThing!"?
Specific varieties of work are best suited to the desktop computing UI paradigm. That's distinctly different from "iThings are just content consumption devices." It's insufficiently rigorous thinking; also it's bullshit.
Warren Ellis has written tremendous amounts of his serious work on a (non-iOS) mobile device. Mark O'Connor made an iPad his primary coding device [1]. Atomic Tom could perform a song off of just iThings as instruments on the subway.
Please stop repeating the 'mobile devices are just for content consumption' meme. It's bullshit.
1: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...
Judging by the number and sales and downloads of both the Apple app store ( http://www.apple.com/iphone/from-the-app-store/ ) and the Anroid Market ( https://market.android.com/apps ), I would say you are somewhat out of touch.
EDIT: Also, you'll note that from your own posted link the author had to get a wireless keyboard. There was nothing he accomplished there that couldn't have been done just as well (and possibly more cheaply) using a netbook.
As for email--yes, there are hundreds of alternatives, but somehow we keep coming back to email, and when we need to guarantee that somebody else can communicate with us, that's what we use. I've had Skype updates break. I've had Google Chat randomly disappear or be inaccessible. I've had AIM clients (of many varieties) die on me. Email, barring the normal issues you see with it, is always there.
This is completely false in my experience.
1) Businesses use wikis all the time. The last 4 places I've worked at have had department wikis. This includes a University, a Mega-Bank, a family owned e-tailer, and a medium-sized consulting firm, which hits just about every size business you can have aside from "start-up".
2) Getting a wiki set up is trivial. For the large companies you request the IT side to give you a VM and an address on the intranet. For the small companies it's usually a spare box and an address on the intranet. It's dead simple.
Also I suspect you would be surprised at how much leeway managers have in choosing collaboration mediums. Email is the old standby, yes, but many managers will choose other ways to collaborate within their department. Most businesses have an IM server for internal chats as well.
This is the key point here: there are many other office suites out there, but no other will provide a) as much compatibility with MS Office (anybody who had to ever receive any kind of important document as a .doc or .docx, and had it inevitably not open correctly in anything but Word, will agree) and b) as much familiarity with the UI than MS Office.
I'd like to say that Office is around because everyone is too used to it, but Microsoft has, indeed, taken many right steps to make it even better (I do think the ribbon was a step in the right direction, but that's subjective), except maybe not making the Mac version look anything like its Windows counterpart.
Either way, MS has pretty well cemented its position in "work" software. IMO, there's still no good office suite on any of the mobile OS's, so I don't see how MS had missed the boat there yet. If anything, it's one area where Windows 8 could succeed: the first tablet OS which actually lets you get some work done. Time will tell.
However, I think there is an interesting scenario that during the coming years, tablets and laptops might converge, into "convertible laptops" such as the Asus Transformer prime.
If Apple were to introduce such a device, that ran iOS in tablet mode, but OSX in laptop form, that could be a very real alternative to MS. Apple could then capitalize on the consumer desire for tablets, to move users from MS platform to Mac platform, where Apple have a good office suite in iWork.
Such a scenario could open up real competition on office suites.
Until then though, I agree that iOS or Android won't come anywhere near threatening Office, and it's a bit misguided of the author to announce the coming death of the market leader, based on a few personal experiences by himself and his wife.
iWork does okay in this sort of setting. In enterprise there is zero competition for MS Office though. The main hangups are Excel and Outlook (not email, but large group collaboration). Document writing (Word) and presentations (Powerpoint) have mostly been figured out and passed by in some cases.
I've tried StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Abiword, WordPerfect, and every other option available. Nothing comes close to Word in functionality. Sure you can write a few paragraphs and do rich text in any of those options, but if you're doing anything at all complicated you need more.
And yet LibreOffice Calc works as well as Excel in almost every way that I've used it.
And Outlook...I don't know a sysadmin who doesn't hate Outlook or (especially) Exchange. It's true, though, that no one else really has that functionality together in a reasonable package. Talk about a vulnerable product to target, though; I guess GMail is trying to take it down, though I would have a hard time trusting Google to manage all of my email. Nothing against Google, but their tech-support is practically nonexistent, so if there WERE a problem, there's no recourse.
And you've hit on the main problem with replacing Office. Everyone seems to use 10 different features from each application and those features don't seem to overlap. When I write documents I generally need something simple so my feature set for a writer is simple and mostly covered.
OTOH, I use a lot of Excel features that simply don't exist in other products. A big one used to be pivot tables, but those have been replicated somewhat. The problem is that Excel moved the bar further by adding more features like essentially being a window into MSAS and allowing users to build pivot tables and reports directly from data housed in MSAS.
And yeah, Exchange is a PITA to manage (it has gotten better, 5.5 was a nightmare), but it's still the best group collaboration, email, calendaring, scheduling, whatever else it does platform out there.
Those tools are still used big time in the business world (which is magnificently bigger than this community).
On one hand, you have things like CSV which Excel understands but doesn't prefer... easily generatable from a database or flat-file even using comamnd line cut/sed/awk.
On the other hand you have XLS(X) - which a TON of enterprise software generates - because it works better on Excel (lockin!) and supports things CSV doesn't (multi-sheet files, formatting, even pivot tables and such).
To win or even compete in this space you need to support the file formats - Apple's Numbers supports XLSX, but the feature support is minimal and lots of edge-conditions that are not present when using Excel crop up here (as with Libre/OpenOffice).
This is such a juvenile, condescending, and back-patting way to look at Microsoft, and I’m fucking sick of it. I prefer Windows, I prefer Office, and I prefer C#, Visual Studio, and ASP.NET MVC. I used a Mac as my primary computer from 2007-2010, and I used Linux from 2010-2011, and I ended up back on Windows by choice. I used an iPhone, I used Android, and I ended up Windows Phone by choice. I’ve programmed in Ruby (Rails and Sinatra), Python, JavaScript, Node.js, and am currently writing an app in ASP.NET MVC by choice. I’ve used OpenOffice, I’ve used Google Docs, I’ve used Evernote, and currently use OneNote, Word, and Excel (backed by SkyDrive) by choice.
Implying people using Microsoft stuff are just sheeple who haven’t seen the light yet is as fucking stupid as claiming that people only use Apple products because of marketing and design. I have no problem with people using Apple products, Linux, or anything, I just hate the anti-Microsoft circle jerk that certain subsets of those communities sustain themselves on.
I'm not sure I buy the central premise, though- I don't know anyone that does Office-style work on their iPhone, and very few that do on their iPad. I'm not sure if there is an optimal interface for editing spreadsheets, but an iPad sure as hell isn't it.
On the iPad App Store charts:
Top Paid
3. Pages
11. Keynote
13. Numbers
Top Grossing
3. Pages
17. Keynote
18. Numbers
Those numbers seem to me to imply that a large number of people use office apps on the iPad.
They seem to work very well for producing documents.
I'm sure a lot of people benefit from those apps, but I would be very surprised if the "regular-usage" numbers are anywhere near the sales numbers.
I should admit that I do not use my iPhone for productive work, except reading, because the tools I use, Latex, Bibdesk, Processing and Python, are not available on the phone, will never be, and would be ill-suited to it in any case.
The iPad seems quite capable of handling moderate document creation. Add a BT keyboard and it becomes very similar to a low end laptop.
Care to link to some of these reports? I am curious to see if desktop/laptops are being replaced and if there are companies employees in the office with a tablet as their only work device.
What I find is that companies are buying tablets as additional devices to augment, not replace desktops and laptops. Thus I am very curious about the reports you have apparently been seeing.
Side question: Does anyone on HN know anyone in their company or friends circle whose sole work device is a tablet(traveling salesmen etc. are excluded) ?
>The iPad seems quite capable of handling moderate document creation. Add a BT keyboard and it becomes very similar to a low end laptop.
And you can make an octopus by nailing more legs to a dog. Doesn't make it a very good octopus though.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/external/display.jsp?mode=deta... http://www.mactrast.com/2012/01/more-than-1-in-10-ipad-owner...
Both referencing the same IDG report.
http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-stats-research/2012/02/17/on...
Apparently Doctors are replacing laptops with iPads.
http://brainerddispatch.com/news/2012-02-09/cass-county-boar...
County board replaced aging laptops.
Apple itself keeps saying that Fortune 500 companies are buying large quantities of iPads. They can't all be for consumption.
Not all, but you might be surprised at how low the ratio of creators to consumers is in more large enterprises.
Why can't they all be for consumption?
The IDG report refers to business communication, which I am guessing is reading and writing emails.
Regarding the doctors, the article states this:
> In fact, Manhattan Research found that internet usage on the iPad was more common that doctor's internet access on cell and smartphones (18%), but still considerably less than their web access on desktops and laptops (55%).
Where do you see them replacing laptops?
>http://brainerddispatch.com/news/2012-02-09/cass-county-boar....
Guess what they're replacing with the iPad. Paper.
Still, I haven't seen a single shred of evidence of a large number of people in companies with the iPad as their only device.
My mom is an attorney and works with office every day. She's also in her 50s and not technologically fluent. But she got an iPhone. And then she got an iPad. She even got a keyboard for the iPad; which I rolled my eyes at, but that's where some of us are blind here. One of the first things she asked me was where office was--there is no doubt she would have purchased office had it been available--instead she downloaded a bunch of things (pages, docstogo, QuickOffice) and worked out which of those she likes. And she uses them a ton now; even to create documents.
Where I think the author is a bit off is in his assessment that the wizard has been revealed. I think Office is a good product for a lot of people and I think my mom would still buy it if they rolled one out for iOS (and I think they're working on it). Moreover, most corporate offices are deeply entrenched in office, and it will take years for that to change (my machine at work still comes with ie 7--how sick is that?). So, Microsoft still has time, but I think there's merit to the argument that they're behind and need to recover. Some damage has already been done, but it's not too late.
Bollocks. Completely. Comparing people "getting things done" in Office to "getting things done" on their iPhone is ridiculous and I now refuse to further hear any opinion the author has.
The author's biggest miss seems to be the realization that the range of computational devices and their application is growing exponentially and that Microsoft doesn't necessarily need to be in every game.
The iPhone and iPad are examples of computational expansion not necessarily a complete paradigm shift.
Besides, some of the stuff MS has shipped in the past few years (Win7, Office20##, WinPhone, etc.) seems to run pretty well. They might not be quite so bleeding edge anymore but it sure looks like a bunch of people are working hard on their products.
I think that the author's point is that they would be in a much better position if they were in every game. I agree.
Microsoft's biggest win is making people think they need them, and every platform they are not on is another chance for a customer to see that they don't need them to do their work. This is not the case with all of their customers, but I can't argue that it seems like a valid point.
Do they "need" to be on every platform? Not in the sense that they would fail as a company if they don't. Would it benefit them, their image, and their message? Without question.
http://gigaom.com/mobile/uh-oh-pc-half-of-computing-device-s...
By 2015 that will be bigger than the total world-wide amount of PCs..its a market MS needs to be in PERIOD!
Biggest miss would be having SB as CEO..
Who are these people? And no, tweens and non working folks don't count, they wouldn't buy Office apps for their iPad or iPhone anyway.
The vast majority of the developing world. Many countries have never had wired internet but have 3G popping up everywhere. Hundreds of millions of people that have never owned and never will own a "desktop computer" are going to get smartphones by 2015.
Try to remember that the USA is less than 5% of the world's population. Most people don't have a desktop computer and never will. They're starting on smartphones now and as tablets become cheaper they will get those too.
For most people, it's a huge personal investment to learn something like excel/ppt/word. For many years, the value in learning something new just wasn't there (IE: I still can't drive stick cause I don't need to).
But now with the mobile revolution, people are open to a new software investment because of all the great things tablets and smartphones offer. In the process of using these devices, they are open to learning new things and then ultimately come to the revelation the author is talking about.
I'm not sure what MS could have done, but slapping Office on Android & iOS devices from the start would have helped. There's a reason google has hugely popular software in iOS, despite owning Android. I just think MS is too arrogant to go that route.
When you've got so little horsepower there's only so much you can do. I can't imagine being able to provide feature parity and a usable interface for end users on a mobile device, not until these things get a lot more powerful. I constantly see end users struggling with these features which they need to do their jobs. I'm not sure if giving them a watered down experience is the big benefit this author things it is. They'll go crazy when they are told that track changes isn't supported or VB script or god knows what else.
I'm not sure if this is MS arrogance or an admission that an office replacement on your tiny phone isn't possible yet and/or end users aren't willing to deal with software with 1/100th the features. Didn't apple just do this with the newest version of Final Cut? Everyone thinks complex software is the problem, but when we take away the features "no one uses or understands" suddenly the silent majority comes out the woodwork.
The take away for the cult of apple types is that the silent majority is out there and dwarfs the walled garden/patent litigious world of Apple. Just because your sleepy intro to anthropology course at that local state u can mostly be taken with mobile tools doesn't mean everything can be. Life's different in the busienss world or when you need to get shit done with minimal fuss and don't care whether the hipster contigent is standing in line outside of the Apple store again for yet another disposable toy that does you absolutely no good.
I know its very satifsying to think you'er part of some revolution and laugh at the old guard, but I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing niche devices for residential/entertainment needs and the big "everything that is not mobile will die by 2011 at the latest" never materialized. This author is one of these guys, an Apple rapturist, and the rapture is always right around the corner.
Really HN? This is rated at the top of the site? A disposable "har har MS" essay by an extremely biased source. Frankly, we can do better.
The copy of Word on my mother's computer was recently corrupted somehow. Printing didn't work, and if you tried Word became non-functional until you wiped out all stored preferences.
She didn't know what to do. She just wanted to type up recipes, little notes to friends, etc. My brother showed her TextEdit and she had what she needed. She is used to Word. When you need to type on the computer, you use Word.
But it's not like back when she was using her dissertation. I wouldn't expect people to type a dissertation in TextEdit. But when all you need is to type up little rich text documents, TextEdit works great.
I think there are a lot of people like that. They've been trained on Word and think they need word. Far a large number, there is tons of other software that can accomplish what they want.
What I got out of the article was the author's realization that because MS didn't have Office ready, people were forced to make due. They had to use Pages or Keynote. Or maybe they just used email directly. But some of those users learned that they don't really need Word... and that could be a dangerous trend for MS.
There are always people who need the features of Word, or some of the really advanced stuff in Excel.
But most users just type up text in Word and add a little formatting. Most users use Excel as a grid, sometimes putting a formula or two in. Powerpoint is used to write text, put up images, and animate a bit.
All those use cases can be easily replaced with other, simpler, software. Now that some users know that, they might stop buying Office.
I work with people who use Excel 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. There is no competitor to that product. Google Docs doesn't even scratch the surface. And, as much as I hate Word and think it's a poor authoring tool as well as a poor document layout tool, most people want one app that is a mix of both. For them, there is no competitor to Word.
Welcome to the real world!
In your experience, what are the most important things that Excel does that no one else does (or does well)?
The asymmetry is that Microsoft seems to think it ought to own consumer computing as well, and is wasting billions trying to achieve that, while Apple is playing directly to it's strengths with almost pathological vigour and knows it's limitations.
As an aside this is why I think MS should have jumped into bed with Blackberry, not Nokia, on the phone front. Their natural market is corporate mobile communications, from which they could then attack the consumer market - actually just as BB did before Apple ran them off the smartphone road.
Apple's chief weakness is that it doesn't really try to attack business computing, from what I can tell. That's all fine and dandy - consumer computing is rather large - but it essentially relegates them to second place because of Microsoft's dominance in business computing.
I think, what Microsoft really missed out on was getting the Metro UI mainstream earlier on. Not looking at what the Zune team was doing. They started with the UI innovation back in 2006, but MS just didnt take things seriously.
Let's see how things are changed with Windows 8
I wrote a post about it a month ago: http://pdobson.com/post/16681986243/microsoft-should-own-the...
Their primary mistake in all of their hardware decisions has been making hardware at all. They will always be a software company that made billions putting their software on other people's hardware. They should have been trying to put XBox Live on the PS2, they should have been trying to put Office on the iPhone, they should have been trying to get Visual Studio working in Linux.
There should be no XBox, there should be no Windows Phone, and LAMP developers should be using Visual Studio instead of vim.
Instead they decided if a piece of hardware wasn't running Windows, they had to build their own hardware and compete in a crowded marketplace instead of using their dominance to own said markets.
The author's wife convinced him, not all those clients...given the different considerations entailed, I would say that the easier of the two is done.
The article makes a valid point - we do not need bloated desktop software to produce documents. Some of the people already realized this - the question is how long it will take for most of the people to realize this.
Of note, Microsoft Jan 2010 Profit: Windows OS + Windows Server = ~$13B, Office = ~$8B
Source: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217...
Not everyone can/will take this route, but they've certainly lost me as a customer for anything other than video games.
If you think Microsoft, what do you think?
> Microsoft Windows
> Microsoft Office
> Internet Explorer
> .Net
Let's tackle them:
Internet Explorer -- Use windows. It only works on windows. If you leave windows your browser is no longer available. Originally intended to make even the web work on windows only. Basically Macs were crippled to all hell. Counters -> Firefox, Safari, Chrome are all cross platform, most people who use that suffer nothing switching.
.Net -- Its Objective-C for windows. There are more uses for it, yes, like writing servers as an alternative to java, except they work on windows. End of the day it serves the same purpose.
Windows -- The flagship product. This is what MS wants you to use, and on your server, because this makes MS money. The problem is that MS makes zero dollars from a computer that can run Windows. It makes money on windows. Piracy is a real problem. If I was to install a pirated windows on a computer, MS is quite furious for good reasons. Compare that to Apple who will give you a copy of OSX if you ask them really nicely, and does NOTHING to prevent piracy. The only thing they care is that it runs on Apple hardware. More later.
Office -- The other flagship product. They convince businesses that sharing information is only possible with this. Period. As Google Docs, LibreOffice, Confluence, Basecamp, etc start to become more and more popular, the office stronghold is being chipped away brick by brick, and MS can't lay bricks fast enough to counter.
Let's compare that to Apple's model:
iTunes -- Initially shipped with DRM to prevent using anything other than iPods to play music. By the time they removed DRM it didn't matter, iPods were here to stay.
App Store -- You can only run the apps on iPhone/iPod/iPad/OSX
OSX -- If it's pirated, who cares, it only runs on Apple hardware.
Garage Band -- Eh, its cheap. Whatever, use it if you like. Its OSX only so we'll give it practically for free.
Safari -- Runs on windows and mac. They don't care about linux. Just to get people used to the "mac way"
You also speak of their 'downfall' in the past tense, as if it's already happened. They still push 90% of desktop market share, rule enterprise, rule the Office suite business, and have some nifty things going on in the entertainment side (not profitable, but nifty nonetheless).
How long does it take and how much does it cost them make a version of Office? Maybe they already have it in progress. They have been recently releasing apps for iOS and Android.
Interesting, people have been predicting the end of MS anytime soon since more than a decade on Slashdot. Meanwhile, they keep getting record profits. This is nothing but feel good linkbait for the Apple fans to lap up.
Meanwhile, the face that they released OneNote for Android and iOS is totally lost in the brouhaha.
After all, this is a site where Gruber and Sieger get top billing but Paul Thurrotts Winsupersite is shadowbanned totally from even appearing on the site, probably due to sensitive fans' excessive flagging.
If the tables were turned, we would be hearing endlessly about how Microsoft takes 75% of the web server profits, even if Apache and nginx are ahead in marketshare.
"After all, this is a site where Gruber and Sieger get top billing but Paul Thurrotts Winsupersite is shadowbanned totally from even appearing on the site, probably due to sensitive fans' excessive flagging."
Those are not substantial critiques, those are insults. Those are bad contributions to the discourse here and make you look like an asshole.
"They have been recently releasing apps for iOS and Android ... they released OneNote for Android and iOS"
Much better.
I have 2 use cases for notes - short term stuff I need in the next day and longer term notes I might need for 6 months+. The first I used to do with something like the "stickies" applet in Linux - eventually I found those to be too much trouble to maintain/delete and moved to a paper notebook. The latter case I keep in plain text files. When I tried OneNote it seemed to have a horribly complicated interface and I didn't understand what it added to the equation.
I just use textfiles and directories, though.
¹ I think it adds a global keyboard shortcut to launch the tool.
I don't know anyone (even in the past 10 years) who's ever mentioned using OneNote.
The "I don't know anyone who use is so it doesn't exist" argument doesn't really hold. The only time I've heard of anyone using Vim was 12 years ago. That was a guy with very long, very dark hair who didn't talk much.
Does this mean Vim is not widely used? Of course not. It just means I don't work with people using Vim.
Look around the web for OneNote resources, I'm sure you'll find plenty.
Now, how many do you think involved a spreadsheet-type app on android or iOS.
I bet you even the guys who raised a round to build a spreadsheet app (not thinking of anyone in particular) did so flinging excel sheets back and forth.
Hell, you don't even see apple dogfooding any excel replacements. There just isn't any dogfood there. Tim Cook uses excel for Mac. And in the evenings, uses the iPad for entertaintment or light email.