Google Challenging Microsoft For Business Software 235
A reader tips a report at the NY Times about the progress Google is making in its quest to unseat Microsoft's position atop the business software industry. From the article:
It has taken years, but Google seems to be cutting into Microsoft's stronghold — businesses. ... In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it. One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe. ... Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat. Google 'has not yet shown they are truly serious,' said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft's business division. 'From the outside, they are an advertising company.'"
Hold on, let me google translate this... (Score:4, Interesting)
From Language: Microsoft Business Division Marketspeak
"Google has not yet shown they are truly serious. From the outside, they are an advertising company."
To Language: Reality
"We have shit in our pants about this and aren't able to figure out how to avoid destruction, so we'll try to dismiss the threat. We always say the same about real threats. And worst, our bad dreams always turn up true (see previous dismissals about Linux, Apple, Facebook and Google before)"
Re:Hold on, let me google translate this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Hardly. I'm no MS fanboy, but Google's apps are a joke for businesses. The word processor and spreadsheet apps are not anywhere close to being something people want to use. My wife and I use it for sharing some spreadsheets and notes, its kind of like a tablet. Yea, its cool and all, but if you want to get real work done, its not what you use.
More important, Google is removing features to top it off, and adding things that no one cares about. For example, killing proper active sync ... I'd give you an example of a feature they've added but I don't care about them so I can't even be bothered to remember.
Dismissals of Apple we bad. Dismissals of Linux were reasonably accurate in the desktop space, though it does have a good run in the dirt cheap servers market until you factor in the number of companies held hostage by some douche admin. Facebook is a passing fad and its clear to any intelligent business on the planet. Thats not to say that those businesses aren't going to profit from that fad as it goes screaming by. Outside of search, Google isn't really owning anything. Android is a race to the bottom. Yes, they have a flagship device or 3 that almost doesn't suck, but its popularity isn't with decent devices, its with free phones that might as well be running some properitary OS as they are so weak and feable you really don't get any of the advantages Android brings to the table.
Google may one day beat out Windows and Office, but it won't be with anything they currently have offered. I have a couple friends who are employed by Google and thus are Google fanboys, they rant on about how awesome it is and how you don't need offline apps or Microsoft/Apple and then every time we go somewhere we end up in a situation where they can't do something I can. My wife likes her Nexus 7, but she'd rather have an iPad mini. Yes this is anecdotal, but its pretty common outside the fanboy arena.
Microsoft may be throwing some spin on it, but they are hardly going to disappear anytime soon due to Google's current offerings anymore than Apple's current offerings are going to put them out of business. Facebook is still irrelevant.
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No bells and whistles (Score:5, Insightful)
Now gmail and to some extent also video chat in Google are pretty impressive. But the rest of the Google Apps are pretty pathetic feature-wise compared to MS Office. Except for collaboration features that just work out of the box.
But the problem for Microsoft is that with more and more business communication never going through paper, many of these features are actually not terribly important compared to effortless collaboration, in fact their existence just make the products more complicated.
An exception here might be Excel and the support for extending Word/Excel/Outlook - some people integrate their workflow toolchain into Office rather than the other way around. But still, a sizable chunk of Microsoft's market could probably switch and be happier.
I guess that's why Microsoft is jumping on the cloud bandwagon too. Which strikes me as a smart idea, I do think that most organizations would probably prefer to continue to pay Microsoft, even if it's a bit more expensive.
Re:No bells and whistles (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SharePoint (Score:4, Informative)
I've never understood the point of SharePoint. Maybe I've never seen it implemented properly, but I don't see how a company could come up with a valid cost/benefit justification for it. OTOH, marketing promises and the lure of moving all IT to low-cost sites probably makes it very attractive to corporate heads; (often unmeasured) worker productivity be damned.
Re:SharePoint (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen it implemented properly either. From my experience I've seen document versions disappear and the whole checkin/checkout thing seems to get confused. So people end up doing a save as and giving the new version a different name than the previous one...defeating the purpose of SharePoint. It seems to be quite slow as well. Again, maybe this was just the way it was being managed but I'm still looking for a correctly implemented version.
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You've never seen it properly implemented? Are you kidding? Has *anyone* seen Sharepoint properly implemented? *Can* anyone implement Sharepoint properly? All positive I hear about Sharepoint is akin to: "Sharepoint is great because of X, Y and Z! Unfortunately you need a team bigger than your current development team just to do less than you currently do! Yay!" Of course, most of the people who push it are Microsoft crackheads...
The success cases for Sharepoint are slow and fragile web sites. It is simply
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Many companies TRY the cloud and TRY to integrate it into their workflow ... then realize they can't, since you can't customize the cloud to suit your needs, you take what they give you.
You can integrate your workflow with Office, you can't with Google. You can't make Gmail plugins with any meaningful capabilities. You can't extend Docs in any way that matters.
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You'd better tell Google. They think they publish an API to allow you to do just this.
https://developers.google.com/drive/ [google.com]
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They are an advertising company, like who else? (Score:5, Informative)
Google 'has not yet shown they are truly serious,' said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division. 'From the outside, they are an advertising company.'
From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh506371(v=msads.10).aspx [microsoft.com]
Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8
The Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 allows developers to show ads in their apps. You can use your Windows 8 apps to make money by including ads from Microsoft Advertising. The Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 along with Microsoft pubCenter enables you to create apps that:
Re:They are an advertising company, like who else? (Score:5, Informative)
You should check out how much money Microsoft has spent over the last ten years trying to become an advertising company. They know that between FOSS alternatives and Google that MS Office is doomed and they're looking for a new cash cow. They tried TV (many times in many ways) and failed. They tried video games and, while they managed to break into the market, it's certainly no cash cow like Office is. That's why their current focus is on Bing and cloud services and other services that Google already does better and more successfully -- basically, the statistic you provided just demonstrates how massively MS is failing in their current endeavors. They're still just milking the same old cows that are ready for the slaughterhouse while their grain fields are failing to grow.
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Obviously the paragon of wisdom on /. is the guy that uses ad hominem attacks, capitalizes words for emphasis, misinterprets my post, and posts as an AC. Oh, yeah, and the "GOOG-tard" thing is a real fine example of your credibility and objectivity.
If you think that Microsoft can continue to rake in billions off Office software and their operating system for decades to come you're sadly mistaken. You're correct that for Apple advertising is merely supplemental income, but Microsoft has been desperately sear
Google has not yet shown they are truly serious... (Score:5, Funny)
Why is this news? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I wonder if this whole story is veiled astroturfing. $50 per year per person is a good deal?! Compared to an online game like WoW, maybe, but not compared to free, and I suspect not compared to a support contract for that free software. Funny how the only producers mentioned by name were MS and Google. No other office suite, such as LibreOffice, was mentioned.
As for collaboration, I don't know. Should distributed version control be built into a word processor app? Why not just have a plugin for git,
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I hate to burst your bubble, but companies that stay in business don't use LibreOffice. They have to get work done, not worry about a political agenda and trivial 'cost'.
Why do so many people fail to understand that the cost of MS Office is ALWAYS less than one weeks salary, therefor the cost is irrelevant as a business expense. Once you stop thinking about cost, theres no intelligent reason to use an inferior product like LibreOffice. If you don't realize its inferior then you don't actually function in
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I often hear this contention about LibreOffice, yet somehow the people making such a claim never explain why it is inferior. Can you point to a list of useful features that MS Office has and LibreOffice lacks? Or critical flaws with LibreOffice that make it unready for "enterprise" use? I would really like to see such a list. If you cannot, why shouldn't I take you for one of the many shills that appear to infest this site, particularly after you slang my alleged lack of experience in the "real" busines
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Google will try, but the fact it is not fully compatible with the mountain of Microsoft Office files generated out there over the years is why Google Apps will not seriously challenge Office--especially once Microsoft releases Office to run on the iOS platform (due some time in 2013).
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There is absolutely nothing in the NYTimes story that points to any new development that justifies the headline.
600,000 systems in the Veteran's Administration are being moved to Office 365 For Government. [microsoft.com]
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Chooses Office 365 for its 600,000 Employees [office.com]
Google touted its ISO 27001 certification for Google Apps for Business last week, which Office 365 for Government also qualifies for. Just like its predecessor, the Business Productivity Online Suite Federal, Microsoft's new service also supports a plethora of other certifications, including SAS70 Type II, the US Health Insurance Portability, Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the US Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Microsoft also plans to support Criminal Justice Information Security policies soon. The service will soon offer support for IPv6 as well.
The major difference between Microsoft's enterprise solution and this government cloud is that the government data lives on its own segregated infrastructure. Besides this --- and the additional certifications --- Microsoft's government solution includes virtually the same services as the enterprise version, including Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online and Office Professional Plus. Given that Microsoft's enterprise solution is also now FISMA certified, this new service is mainly meant for agencies that have requirements beyond this certification.
Microsoft Launches Office 365 For Government [techcrunch.com]
The other thing about Google Apps (Score:2, Interesting)
The other thing about Google Apps is that it's designed for Chrome and if it works on anything else that's nice but they don't care and it's Not Supported. (You can also use Chromium.)
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The other thing about Google Apps is that it's designed for Chrome and if it works on anything else that's nice but they don't care and it's Not Supported. (You can also use Chromium.)
My company uses google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations on Firefox and IE. We told them our configuration, and we get support. I think you are full of shit.
Microsoft declared war 5 years ago (Score:2)
Try supporting IE 7/8 first (Score:2)
Yeah right
First off do not tell 90% of corps who standardize on IE 6, 7, and 8 to go hell! Google docs is absolutely useless. Not even IE 8 which is the defecto standard for every single Intranet app in existence. I could see dropping IE 6 (that itself will cost business). Corps must use IE only as it is the only one with group policy, active directory, mass deployment, and a slow release cycle. Before the IE haters mod me down, ask yourselves why aren't you writing extensions to Firefox and Chrome for thes
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They don't have to support old IE versions - they're in the fortunate position of being in the early part of their growth curve. They don't have legacy installations to support, and will be kept busy for years to come supporting the customers whose infrastructure is a good fit for them - or those who are willing to install Chrome alongside their legacy IE browsers, where necessary.
I work for Roche. The article is wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
The article is wrong and misleading. I work for Roche. Posting anon for obvious reasons.
Roche is replacing Exchange Server with Google mail and calendar and the project hasn't even left the pilot phase. That's it. Everyone will still use MS Outlook although Google will be the new web mail interface. Everyone will still use MS Office. Everyone will still use SharePoint. Everyone will still use Lync for IM. Roche is only changing out the back end for mail and calendar.
Genentech, which is a company owned by Ro
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I agree. I've noticed that /. summaries are getting less and less self-contained.
I think that this was the worst one [slashdot.org] in recent memory, with "WAF" going unexplained.
This one [slashdot.org] was also particularly bad.
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Google Apps. It's in the second sentence of the article.
How do you get a claim of invention? they've simply added it to their product.
Granted the submitter could have substituted for 'it", but he does say "from the article," which should have given you some indication of where to look. You could have answered your own questions faster than you wrote y
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Really? This is a Google invention?
Yeah, kind of. Google apps are web based, and the ability to work on a web based app without a connection to the server is new - certainly for anything as complex as an office documents app. May not have been invented by Google, but it certainly wasn't an obvious piece of cake. I don't know that Office 365 can do it (without a locally installed copy of Office).
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'Added the ability' is not meant to be read 'invented' - please bring a meaninful criticism to the discussion if you have one.
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It's not even accurate. I work for Roche in the UK, and currently, we use MS Office. There are apparently plans to transition us to Google Apps sometime in 2013, but that's as close as it gets. I believe that this is the case for other countries, and the global organisation too. (Incidentally, this transition was pushed by the Roche - Genentech merger: Genentech uses Google Apps, and to align the two organisations, one had to move. Google won... although Genentech colleagues lament the loss of Outlook
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Simply snipping an article excerpt, without correct context, is poor editorial work.
You must be new here. And moderators, the parent post, my comment, and every comment responding to the comment is offtopic. I don't come here to read someone whining about how bad the summary is, and the fact that it was first post makes it even worse.
Come on, guys, we need a whole lot of downmods here. It's all offtopic.
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For Google, it is a new invention. See, Google is attacking MS from the internet, while Microsoft is lashing out at Google from the PC. It's essentially Netscape vs. Microsoft, Part 2. And since Ballmer doesn't hold a candle to Gates's genius, he can't see where he is being attacked from, nor how to respond; sad really, since his predecessor already wrote the game plan for this.
Ballmer is trying to transition MS into an internet company (and sometimes a software / hardware company, ala Apple), and plans to
Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat.
Isn't this what happened to Microsoft in the mobile/phone/tablet space? Now they are playing catch-up to both Google and Apple. Complacency is a dangerous copilot.
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Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat.
Isn't this what happened to Microsoft in the mobile/phone/tablet space? Now they are playing catch-up to both Google and Apple. Complacency is a dangerous copilot.
Google are a huge threat! Oglviy migrated all its users to "GMail", the employees really hate it vs proper exchange, outlook, office stack. But when a few massive companies like Oglviy migrate Google will improve to the point where they become more solid contenders.
The real threat is not Google ... (Score:4, Informative)
... but rather, walled garden and locked devices
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How is this related to the story of business software? I know Slashdot loves to trash Apple (or whoever is on top at the moment), but at least make your comment relate to the discussion please.
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That's funny... I've never had gmail lock up... or tell me I had too much mail and I couldn't send until I deleted some... Outlook is a dinosaur and it's time for it to die.
Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:5, Informative)
That's not Outlook, that's an Exchange setting. If you were using Outlook as your gmail client you wouldn't get that either.
Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:5, Interesting)
But still, there is a reason pretty much everybody I know use some kind of web based email, gmail probably being the most used. I don't think it's because they hate it. While I don't know how many uses Google docs, you have to be some kind of hardcore office nerd to really need something else.
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It's not the e-mail part that is the problem with gmail at work, it's the calendar.
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For me, the issue is about compatibility. It's not a personal preference for Word. For example, I actually used LibreOffice to create the documents for a presentation and I saved each document in a different Word & Power Point format. Each file had around 3 copies. I then made PDF copies of each, just in case the files were not compatible. LibreOffice claims compatibility, but that doesn't mean that it will be and of course they were not compatible. The files simply would not open in Microsoft's p
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Compatibility is good but not great. If your #1 need is to support Microsoft clients, buy Microsoft.
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Most everyone uses a web based email for home and for continuity. Also many of the advantages of Exchange don't exist without corporate setup and management which doesn't do anything for home. Microsoft is starting to explore creating a consumer oriented version of Exchange for Hotmail / Outlook.com That may very well change things.
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That's not Outlook, that's an Exchange setting. If you were using Outlook as your gmail client you wouldn't get that either.
Strange, I've never seen the "Lock Up Outlook for x Seconds" check box in Exchange, do I find setting under Hub Transport?
If you used Outlook as your gmail client you'd still get freezes and crashes.
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Nonsense about usage. I adore Outlooks task manager integration with the calendar. The ability to create tasks with dependencies, show them in Gantt format, have them automatically schedule and be integrated with coworkers is far far beyond anything gmail does.
Another area is OLE based editing of email. That allows for vastly more complex email than gmail.
Public folders are managed databases with full ability to set backup and retention policies.
Automatic disclosure detection and warnings for users which
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Good points. Though 10 meg clip art laden emails should be stationary and thus tiny from Exchange's standpoint.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
BeOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Which AT&T CPU was BeOS originally on? And when the BeBox was made, the PREP boxes from Motorola were already making their rounds - the PPC was nowhere near fading. Be's mistake was in jettisoning the BeBox before Motorola, Power Computing and Umax endorsed BeOS. When Apple pulled the plug on the clone business, Be could have offered them the choice of making BeOS the default OS for their PREP boxes - in that case, Power Computing would have survived, and PPC, despite this setback and despite OS/2-PPC coming unhinged, would have had a better chance at being successful.
x86 was never a good platform for Be - anybody who had an x86 ran Windows on it, or at a distant second, Linux or OS/2. There was hardly room for a third, fourth or fifth OS. Putting BeOS on one of the alternatives, like PPC was a good move, as was coming out w/ a whole new computer such as the BeBox. Just that as a new OS, there was little native software for that platform (would have been the case on either PPC or x86) and the BeBox itself was more of a home/hobbyist computer, much like the Amigas or Ataris. Had Be kept that platform going and released essential software for it, from money managers, games, office suites, et al, instead of abandoning it just b'cos it could be adapted by clone makers, they may well have been more successful.
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Which AT&T CPU was BeOS originally on?
AT&T Hobbit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History [wikipedia.org]
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Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:4, Funny)
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Since ReactOS is clean room reverse engineered, MS wouldn't be able to do squat. Love the irony, since Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's BIOS launched the clones era...
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That works fine for copyright, but has no affect on the patented bits. If you violate a patent, despite the manner of your solution, you are liable.
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When compatibility matters (Score:2)
I wasn't talking about challengers. I don't expect OS/2 to be compatible w/ Windows, or even 64-bit Windows to be compatible w/ 32-bit Windows. But I do expect Windows 8 to be compatible w/ Windows 7, Windows 7 to be compatible w/ Vista, Word 2007 to be compatible w/ Word 2003, Linux 3.3 to be compatible w/ Linux 2.6, and so on. Essentially, if I could run something on, say, Mint Maya, I expect it to run on Mint Nadia. If I could run something on Windows 7, it should run on Windows 8. If it ran on PC-B
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More simply, BeOS was never in the category of being (or trying to be) a windows replacement, unless you looked extremely far down the road. That should have been evident by their choice of hardware to run on. The worst threat be posed was to next, as to Mac fans everywhere, they were the leading contender up until Steve jobs walked across the stage.
Netscape and WordPerfect are different stories. and even so, if not for tactics such as making os updates that broke their competitors software or simply integr
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While Microsoft did pull every scurvy trick you can think of with IE, it is both true and important that Netscape 4 was such a rickety piece of shit that IE was actually better to use; that Netscape passed up the chance to release an open source Netscape 5 based on the old code base; and that Mozilla took just too fucking long.
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Hum... WP are currently suing MSFT arguing exactly that MS is the one that delayed their Windows version of WP untill near 2000.
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With Android expecting to hit 90% market share
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I doubt that desktop is dead though. Could you imagine cubicle farms where everyone programs/admins from tablets? *shudders*
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Something to consider... cubicle farms themselves are starting to die.
In my current job, I telecommute most of the week. I live within literal spitting distance of the Pacific Ocean, so on nice days I wander out to the edge of my WiFi signal on the beach itself, snag a signal at the coffee shop in town, or basically do my work anywhere I can get online for a VPN hookup. Still have cubes, but they're open now, and most of the time in the office, I drag the laptop from desk to conference room, and sometimes o
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And where does the "good enough" problem stem from? Survey says -> lack of improvement on the hardware / software side.
For instance, it's 2012, soon to be 2013, and our CPU speeds are stuck. We've gone multi-core, but last year's Phenom II was arguably a better buy than this year's FX. The number of stream processors on GPUs may be increasing, but not by much. In short, the tech sector has run into the problem that plagued the American automative industry -> your products this year are essentially the
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Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:5, Insightful)
How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed.
That is not at all what happened. First off Microsoft Word for DOS at the time of the Windows switch was already a rather good product and quite popular. While it was clearly in 2nd / 3rd place it wasn't coming out of nowhere.
WordPerfect was heavily focused on cross platform and many non DOS versions. They were working on a Windows versions and came out within about a year of Windows 3.0's release. DOS was still the dominant platform when WordPerfect for Windows came out. It wasn't all that much more buggy than any of the word Processors were. Word was a bit faster, and better integrated the all around best experience but AmiPro, WordPerfect... were better and frankly DeScribe was likely the most feature rich least buggy word processor of the time.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating. WordPerfect was hit with a common problem where it made economic sense for them lose marketshare rather than immediately cut prices by 90%. They eventually did offer a product mixed with Borland's Paradox and QuatroPro but by then it was too late.
Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't just the competitive upgrades. They also struck deals with OEM's so that, for a while at least, it was hard to find a Windows PC that didn't come with MSOffice 'for free'. That was the point where the company I worked for switched from WordPerfect to Word. And people complained for the next 6 months about the lack of WordPerfect's show codes feature. Of course, they eventually got used to Word, but victory didn't come because of quality or desire - it was monopoly bundling deals pure and simple.
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Good point. It was the focus on being willing to sell so cheaply both retail and via. OEM bundling.
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Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating.
Exactly and this happened because the suits took over at Word Perfect. If you think about it, they were charging customers nearly thousand dollars per head in today's dollars for a freaking word processor. This left the door wide open for a competitor to undercut them heavily in price and still make a mint.
Which is exactly what Microsoft did to Word Perfect, just like Borland had done to Microsoft in the compiler market a few years earlier. So it wasn't like this was a novel (no pun intended) move.
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I don't know about the "the suits". The pricing had been in effect for many years, there was no change for WordPerfect. A good quality professional typewriter could cost up to $5000 at that time. Word Perfect was cheaper than the mini computer systems for mass production. Their were cheap Word Processing programs aimed at the amateur market that were much cheaper.
Microsoft has always shocked competitors by cutting margins. Right now it is doing that in the data-warehouse space and the ERP space.
so what you're saying is (Score:2)
Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:4, Interesting)
has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years
IBM compatibles did not sell at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years. Commodore, Synclair, Atari owned that market slice during the 80s and the early 90s. Apple was lower end than Microsoft. Microsoft was positioned nicely in the middle range with the "junky" systems beneath them and the "too expensive" systems: DEC, SGI, Sun, IBM RISC/6000 ... above them.
The Walmart pricing is a product of the 2000s where corporations stopped upgrading rapidly and thus applications had to support older machines, and discount machines offered the capabilities of older machines. That's a nasty cycle that Microsoft partially created by allowing for a pause with Windows XP. They realize their mistake and they are fixing it.
And yeah, the bottom 1/3rd of the Windows market, which shouldn't have been part of the midrange in the first place might go for something cheaper.
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> same again with Windows VS BeOS, which chose first a lame AT&T CPU that bombed, then the Motorola chip that was already fading before finally getting the sense too late to make an X86 version.
You mean the x86 version that Microsoft prevented the PC makers to install (otherwise the PC makers would have to pay more for Microsoft software)?
Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:5, Insightful)
I might want some of what you're smoking.
Microsoft made their money on Windows and Office. When they lose that base, they are on the way down. When the fall starts, it will accelerate rapidly.
On second thought, no, I don't want any of what you're smoking.
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IBM is today more of a service and consultancy company, aside from the R&D they do on their high end computers, like POWER and Z-Series. They are a leading partner of SAP - there is no way Microsoft could challenge them there. With Oracle, Microsoft has some change, but there too, Oracle has an advantage of being multi-platform on Unix, Linux and Windows, as opposed to Microsoft, which is Windows only. Microsoft could do well by getting into applications services, but there too, they've killed off pr
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Servers and business systems are where the money is at. Licensing is like printing money. Retail markets are ugly. The only reason Microsoft is getting into new businesses is to protect their big products.
Retail markets are competitive but the consumer space is where there is a great deal of money. MS seems to think so: Zune, Wp7, Surface are all plays into the consumer market. MS just sucks when it comes to consumers.
They thought they had it locked up when they controlled the OEM computer market. What is going to hurt MS now is that consumers just are not buy new computers as they used to in the past. Instead they are buying tablets and smart phones to supplement their desktops and laptops.
Here's somet
Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget the whole internet thing and how they ignored it.
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The Microsoft tortoise beat the hares as far as I'm concerned (as a hardcore gamer, a CPAN brogrammer, and a professional gadget fiddler).
You've managed to box yourself in to a demographically trivial corner. Nobody really cares about you. Not Apple, Not Microsoft, Not Google. They're going for where the money is and you ain't it.
So we're all happy your happy and now existentially complete as to your computing needs and desires. But the market doesn't give a damn.
You mean pwned? (Score:2)
one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world got pwned by an advertising company. lol
ftfy
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That's the sticking point for me as well. It seems to me that if someone wants to perform a security breach they are going to go for a big target, not little old me. They are not looking for one credit card number they are looking for millions. So it's only a matter of time before one of these big cloud vendors get violated. Then these big companies are going to get mighty nervous.
Re:So...do the math. (Score:4, Informative)
If you're comparing the cost of GAFYD (Google Apps For Your Domain) to the cost of running Word, Excel, and Powerpoint on your desktop, then either you're doing it wrong, or you wouldn't be well served to switch.
Where GAFYD kicks Microsoft's ass is in online collaboration (because it's better) and unified messaging (because it's less expensive). So it's not about Word -- it's about Google Talk being better than Microsoft Lync, and about Google Mail and Google Drive being being more cost-effective than Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint.
Because it turns out it costs a little more than $50/person to run a really great-running Exchange environment. That's not an oxymoron, BTW - I currently work at a company that has a fantastic Exchange environment, best I've ever seen run. And I'm really going to miss it in the upcoming quarter when IT shoves our migration to GAFYD down my throat. And I'm not even a Windows user ...
Re:90% of the time =! 90% of the market (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft Live is not yet Google Docs, and Google Docs are a long way from Microsoft Office (though each is getting closer).
For a large volume of uses Google Docs is sufficient. If you need to create a simple memo or even a modest legal document Docs is certainly good enough. But it is not remotely getting closer to Office in the larger picture. Office is moving forward much, much faster in high-end business applications. Just take the example of Excel: the new data analysis and reporting capabilities built in to Excel are simply amazing. They exceed anything available from the best vertical reporting apps just a few years back, and are accessible to advanced business users for "playing around" with the data in ways that formerly would have required advanced data warehouse experts. These features in Excel are game changing in the corporate environment where Excel is a stock application for all business user desktops.
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Here's the other thing a lot of people miss when discussing this issue, as well:
Many (bigger) companies would rather have "one office suite to rule them all" than "two separate office suites - one for 'type a memo' guy, and one for 'i need deep and powerful data analysis tools built into my spreadsheet' guy." Especially when those two office suites may not be easily inter-operable.
There is additional support costs associated with having two different packages, and there is an additional "waste" cost associ
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So, purchasing decisions are made in the interests of simplicity and giving everybody a standard tool to work with, and I'd be surprised if Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements weren't reasonably competitive with this on a per-user basis, especially when you figure in the additional features and functionality available that Google Apps simply doesn't have.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
But it's not true. Office has always been a cash cow, and Microsoft have quite clearly decided that anyone who's buying a site license is ripe for the milking. You can't get any of the cheaper "versions aimed at someone who might otherwise go for OpenOffice" under site licensing, which means you have to get the expensive versions with all the features, including those you might not want.
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What about using a cloud based product without internet?
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I know people that do a lot of data analysis on Excel and then just export the relevant bits into reports etc... there's a imperial crap-tonne of work people do that doesn't need collaboration!
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It's because of attitudes like this that things take so long to improve and people end up getting locked into platforms and formats.