False dichotomy

False dichotomy

Posted Oct 31, 2007 22:19 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: False dichotomy by nim-nim
Parent article: GNOME and OOXML

However you can't sell for profit Office suites as tools to create standalone documents anymore (at least not to informed users, as corporate purchasers are).

What? You tell that to Microsoft's Office division, which beat records (20% up) again this year.

Seriously, you can play the strategist and think that the future lies elsewhere. But Microsoft's profits are firmly entrenched in the present, which is operating systems and office suites. While they use existing monopolies as footholds to enter other markets, it is hard to catch them off-guard in their home turf.

Their market value has not reached that of the browser yet, but it's getting close fast (thanks in part to OpenOffice.org)

You make it look as if browsers costed huge quantities of money in the past, and then lost their value. That is not true. Browsers never cost anything since the early days of the internet (Mosaic, then Netscape, then IE, then Mozilla; only Netscape attempted to extort corporate users, and failed miserably). No, browsers were "commoditized" from the beginning.

Yet as soon as it become clear the desktop was Microsoft-owned, other editors stopped bringing new innovative applications there, and focused on the server-side (where you could introduce new lucrative enterprise apps without an inconvenient partner eating all your profits).

This is too simplistic. Other players (Adobe, Quicken) are making lots of money on the desktop.

So while competitors are stuck, adding server application entry point capabilities to Office: 1. de-commodizes Office as a product (get this OpenOffice.org)

That is interesting and may be true, but the basic reasons still rule IMHO: Microsoft wants to make OOXML an ISO standard basically not to lose existing customers, which may want to switch to something not so blatantly proprietary.

As to server integration, Microsoft has tried this kind of thing in the past and failed miserably. For one thing their web server sucks big time; for another (not unrelated) aspect, security is a huge deal in server infrastructure and Microsoft's record there is quite poor. But they are also famous for trying many times before getting things right, so maybe this time they will succeed. Let's hope not.

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>> However you can't sell for profit Office suites as tools to create
>> standalone documents anymore (at least not to informed users, as corporate
>> purchasers are). 
> What? You tell that to Microsoft's Office division, which beat records
> (20% up) again this year.

Because the Office division is not selling tools focused on creating standalone documents
anymore. They sell VBA automation. They sell desktop-to-server solutions. Strip this and you
won't find a lot of entities ready to pay the price Microsoft asks just for the capability to
create .doc and .xls documents (with no macros, no data feeds in and no data feeds out)

> This is too simplistic. Other players (Adobe, Quicken) are making lots of
> money on the desktop.

And they got there when? Before Microsoft consolidated its desktop hold. Had they started
later they wouldn't have targeted the desktop. Sure there are interesting things to do
server-side, but that's not the reason why no one is trying to do new desktop apps anymore.

> But they are also famous for trying many times before getting things
> right, so maybe this time they will succeed.

Going XML and modern programming language is helping them a lot. Sun and IBM would not be so
agitated otherwise. Their pure Office suite revenue is minimal