False dichotomy [LWN.net]

False dichotomy

Posted Oct 31, 2007 20:31 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: False dichotomy by man_ls
Parent article: GNOME and OOXML

> I have to disagree. The money is in a lot of places, including the office
> suite, the corporate apps and whatever you can sell for a profit.

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

Nowadays Office workers do not complain their office-document-producers are not good enough,
they complain they're drowning in mail and web apps and can please someone integrate all this
so they don't have to retype the same info all over the place or open scores of web pages to
work. They don't create office documents from scratch on the desktop anymore, they format data
created or extracted on the server or sometimes just put the finishing touches to documents
partially pre-generated on the server.

Remember:

When the internet exploded, Microsoft tried very hard to neuter it. Pushed exchange and
created a Notes/Outlook duopoly (very successful in getting IMAP nowhere). Used IE to kill
Netscape, and then stopped investing in IE to freeze the browser at a safe level. "Sabotaged"
SUN applet plans. Bill's original vision was a PC for everyone, with the processing done on
the PC, and an end to specialized computers or big centralized mainframes. Crippling the web
client would keep added value desktop-side, where Microsoft was well positioned to harvest it.

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).
Despite the crippling of the network interface, J2EE thrived. Added value and corporate
budgets started leaving the desktop. History showed the browser was not crippled enough, and
with Firefox ready to replace IE Microsoft can not put this particular genie in the bottle.

So Microsoft had to abandon its historical vision to continue growing. Forget PCs for
everyone, welcome to the "computing cloud". Computer cloud being the same things everyone else
is doing, except not in SUN/IBM/BEA/Oracle/Apache/SAP J2EE over *nix, but in .C# over windows,
not using W3C standard formats, but Office XML customized lingua, not accessed through the
browser, but through a network-enabled Office.

The money in this kind of configuration is:
1. server-side
2. in the tools users need to access server-side processing

The nice thing for Microsoft is that even if a dumb IE didn't stop server-side processing
growth, a large IE userbase is very effective in hampering Google+Mozilla+W3C efforts to make
the browser a satisfying server application entry point. IBM realized it too, but it will take
some time before in manages to make OpenOffice.org + Notes + Java + Eclipse lean enough to be
a no-brainer alternative.

On the other hand Microsoft Office already has all the nice data presentation, data input and
data persistence capabilities needed, and has its own bloat hidden by vertue of being
massively pre-loaded in memory.

So while competitors are stuck, adding server application entry point capabilities to Office:
1. de-commodizes Office as a product (get this OpenOffice.org)
2. adds a nice coupling between Windows-as-a-desktop and Windows-as-a-client (get this J2EE +
*nix)
3. opens the possibility to get part of Microsoft networking conventions officially
standards-blessed, by including them in the "Office" format sent to ISO (get this
W3C+Mozilla+Google)

If you take a look at what the French NB asked to remove from OOXML, you'll see everything not
legacy-related is there to help MS Office talk to MS server apps. And that Microsoft is
fighting tooth and nail to keep this stuff not traditionnaly associated with Office suites in
the same standard (otherwise customers my take one but not the other)

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False dichotomy

Posted Oct 31, 2007 22:19 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

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.

False dichotomy

Posted Oct 31, 2007 22:52 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

>> 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

False dichotomy

Posted Nov 1, 2007 20:29 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

MS is very much succeeding in this strategy (It's almost impossible to sell any kind of business software without being met with a demand for SharePoint integration), and they'll definately mainly use Office as a way to create a new lock-in.
We're lucky that our software is so unique that companies accept it as a standalone product (If we didn't offer AD integration though, we'd be game over), but I'm pretty sure that I'll be asked by my boss to port our software to their crap soon... *sigh*