Proprietary drives the software economy

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Office not generic?

Let's first define "generic":

"applicable to an entire class or group"
(dictionary.com)

I can define you out of the arguement here John: given
Office's massive market share, clearly it meets the needs of
pretty much an entire class or group. In fact, most home
and business users. Therefore, Office does very
much fit the generic need for office suites.

I also disagree with your statement that "Office
introduced lots of cool ideas years ago". Microsoft
copied or bought most of the functionality for Office.
Please name one major feature that Office introduced
to business productivity. You will find most were seperate
products either copied or bought and bundled.

Even the latest paletts for modifying styles were around in
WordPro (and Notes) years ago. Word macros were years
behind WordPerfect. The grammar checker was a seperate
product called Grammatik, and so on. Mail merge was very
common in all word processors (and a big driver of the
adoption of word processors in general) and most used the
.doc extension to signify any document, not neccessarily a
Word <ocument.

Many "features" are backward steps - since about Office 97,
copy and paste from another Office document results in an
object, you can't change the default behaviour. Microsoft
want your documents inextricably linked, to avoid it means
several extra mouse clicks, most users are not aware of
what they are creating until to late.

Microsoft's position with Office is precarious because the
marginal value of extra features is about nil - there is very
little left to add. Each new feature does not compel users
to buy the latest version - in my opinion, most upgrade
wiht a new PC because the bundled price is relatively cheap.
Very few people actually buy a full retail copy or upgrade to
replace an existing copy.

Microsoft's empire will crumble. They will not disappear,
but their power will wane. Microsoft's trick is not to take
Office in new directions, but to find new products that
people want to use.

Take a look at Apple - rather than take on Microsoft
directly in Office or OS markets, they solidified their
product and went elsewhere - who would have predicted
the success of iTunes? Or iPod?

That is what MS must discover.

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 05/11/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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