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Microsoft to Pour $3 Billion Into Office | |
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| Time: 07:58 EST/12:58 GMT | News Source: eWeek | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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Microsoft Corp. plans to spend more than $3 billion over the next three years on its Office productivity suite and hopes to double annual revenue from Office to $20 billion by 2010. "I have a $20 billion dream for Office, but the product will be so much more than what we think of today. There will be new categories of application value from a client standpoint, as well as around servers and XML services. | ||
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| #1 By 2231 (164.86.127.2) at 9/24/2002 8:48:21 AM |
| I suspect a sizable chunk of R&D will go towards creating capabilities associated with the international markets. In the long run the US market will pale in comparison to Asian and European demands. That's where the future revenue sources lie. |
| #2 By 6253 (12.237.219.240) at 9/24/2002 10:55:11 AM |
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#6 - In addition to jvmahon's examples, there is Netscape Navigator, which killed Mosaic almost overnight. There is the IBM PC itself. Apple actually took out full page newspaper ads to welcome IBM, believing that IBM's entry into the "microcomputer system" product category would only expand demand for Apple's products. Instead, the entire product category got renamed "personal computers" based on IBM's product name, much as "kleenex" and "xerox" are used generically despite being registered trademarks.
#7 - You really hit upon the key issue. Nowhere in the article does Microsoft claim $3B to be R&D. They simply say they are going to pour $3B into the product. Even if it is R&D, Microsoft has always been very loose about how they define R&D. Creating and testing those round translucent CD cases which Mac Office once came in, and which the Office XP technical beta came in, counts as R&D in Microsoft's books. Doing market surveys to see how well a bundle of Office XP and Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer would sell is R&D. |
| #3 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 9/24/2002 10:59:49 AM |
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The benefit is that we wouldn't have to listen to the Macophiles drone on and on complaining about why their OS should be #1 in market share but isn't. ;)
That does seem to be the major reason to switch, though--animosity towards MS, much more than any comment on their current technology. It's not about money when it comes to products like Office... I think it was Gartner that showed it was nearly impossible for a company to come out ahead overall money-wise if they switched to StarOffice. |
| #4 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 3:10:16 PM |
| Nice comment #1. I can identify you now, only be reading your comments. You are so predictable. |
| #5 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 3:11:01 PM |
| Oh, since Sun has owned StarOffice for what? four years now, I think it is safe to say that StarOffice isn't quickly doing anything. |
| #6 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 3:11:54 PM |
| #6 Microsoft Internet Explorer came from having less than 20% of the market to having more than 90% of the market. |
| #7 By 2960 (156.80.64.132) at 9/24/2002 3:13:06 PM |
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I can see the CompUSA Ad 10 years from now:
"Microsoft Office XPxligx7 V2.0 Upgrade: $1995.00" Those billions gotta come from somewhere! In other words, this info doesn't bode well for those who were hoping for a lower-cost for Office at some point. Personally, I'd prefer they fix the old versions first. And simplify the damned thing, please! Not at the user level, but the tech level. I spend half my time fixing bizarre Office annoyances that are nearly impossible to track or fix because the thing is scattered all over the place in a manner that no one can troubleshoot half the time. TL |
| #8 By 61 (65.32.170.1) at 9/24/2002 3:58:33 PM |
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nom, please, unless you are going to at least show SOME level of inteligence, don't come back.
Larry, SmartTags are meant to do just that. |
| #9 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 4:32:34 PM |
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Any software area into which Microsoft has entered, Microsoft has given serious competition to the previous market leader. Thus far, nobody has ever displaced Microsoft once it becamse the market leader. This post was edited by BobSmith on Tuesday, September 24, 2002 at 16:33. |
| #10 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 4:35:23 PM |
| Mr. Dee, other than the fact that PhotoDraw used the same menus as the rest of Office, I thought it was perhaps with least intuitive UI I had ever seen from Microsoft. I thought it was a horrible program. More than that, it was a least 4 years behind PhotoShop. |
| #11 By 2960 (156.80.64.132) at 9/24/2002 4:54:20 PM |
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I agree BobSmith... PhotoDraw was a bizarre program.
Personally, I think the hottest thing available right now for the money is APE-2. That's Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2.0, of course :) And it comes with the MacOS X and Windows version right in the same box. It's nice to see excellent, fairly priced software that's packaged properly for a change! TL |
| #12 By 61 (65.32.170.1) at 9/24/2002 4:57:25 PM |
| Bob, PhotDraw and Photoshop were in completely different markets... Photoshop is kind of like painting, PhotoDraw is just that, drawing... like Adobe Illustrator.... now the same thing does apply though, Illustrator was YEARS ahead of PhotoDraw. |
| #13 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 5:14:52 PM |
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Maybe I didn't understand what I was supposed to do with PhotoDraw. I know this, though. I was never able to do much with it. I never have been enough of a graphics person to understand the differences between PhotoShop and Illustrator. I know that when I use them, though, I usually got somewhat close to what I was trying to do. That never happened with PhotoDraw. I'm a programmer, though, so we aren't expected to know what things look good.
On that note http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2040637020924.gif |
| #14 By 531 (208.241.173.124) at 9/24/2002 5:14:58 PM |
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To TechLarry in #15:
I'm going to have to disagree with you on your speculation (which I know is an exaggeration) about the rising price. With the next version of Office, Microsoft has said that XML will be natively supported as an Office File Format. Whether this means that XML will be the default is yet to be seen (I thought I heard somewhere that it will be, but I could be wrong), but I believe that it will be highly encouraged to save documents in XML Format. Why? Because it ensures interoperability with XML Web Services, which we all know Microsoft believes to be the Next Big Thing. Now, if Office docs are stored in a universally open format such as XML, it's pretty obvious that products like OpenOffice or StarOffice will easily be able to read, write, and modify Office documents. So, if you've got an office solution that's totally compatible with Microsoft Office, but costs significantly less (or is free), Microsoft will obviously have to do two things: 1. Make Office the logical choice for reasons besides compatability, which would mean that Office is much less klunky, easier to use, and simplistically powerful (features that are difficult to learn or use aren't features; they're dead weight). 2. Lower the price of Office to offset the difference. |
| #15 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 5:48:38 PM |
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Maybe I'm not looking at this correctly. There are a few things I don't really understand about the importance of Microsoft Office using XML as a file format.
First, if Microsoft decides to save documents as XML, that doesn't mean they have to publish the schemas. Certainly you can create several different documents and use all sorts of features and reverse engineer until you get a pretty good schema, but then you could already do that with the existing Word format. Since Word's format hasn't changed since Office 97, I can't see why a few good programmers couldn't in six years reverse engineer Word's file format. Second. What do XML Web Services have to do with Office's default file format? While it is true that XML Web Services use SOAP (an XML specification), nowhere does it say that the payload of SOAP has to be XML. I should rephrase that. From a users perspective, it doesn't have to be XML. Binary data (and a Word doc could fall into this category) can be contained in XML (and by extension can be transported via SOAP in a web service call). Also, in general a Word document is text. Text can be encoded (to remove the possibility of "<" ">" or qutoes or things messing up the document, and send in an XML element. My conclusion here, is that if for whatever reason (and I haven't thought of one yet) that you'd want to send an Office document in a web service call, you can do it now without changing the Office file format. Those are my thoughts on the XML issue. In general, I'd say that Microsoft won't lower the price on Office until customers begin to pull away from them. Personally I don't think StarOffice or OpenOffice.org (why in the heck is ".org" part of the name of the product?) is even close to a viable competitor to Microsoft Office. I've been trying different versions SO and OO.org for a few years now every so often to see how far they've come. They've made progress, but Microsoft Office is still years ahead in my book. |
| #16 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 5:50:56 PM |
| Visicalc. Now there is a name I haven't heard in a long time. I'd say that Lotus 1-2-3 was beat up by Quatro Pro which was beat up by Excel. I guess it doesn't matter though. Excel still ends up on top. |
| #17 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 5:50:59 PM |
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dp This post was edited by BobSmith on Tuesday, September 24, 2002 at 17:53. |
| #18 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 9/24/2002 5:51:27 PM |
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dp This post was edited by BobSmith on Tuesday, September 24, 2002 at 17:55. |
| #19 By 531 (64.109.30.187) at 9/24/2002 7:19:17 PM |
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Bob:
I guess it just depends on how you look at it. It's possible that MS won't necessarily release the XML schema for Office documents, but I can't imagine why they wouldn't. As you said, the binary DOC format hasn't changed since Office 97, and still hasn't been totally reverse engineered, so if they wanted to keep things secret, why not just keep the DOC format? You said yourself that Binary data can be used over webservices, so there's no need for XML if that's what they're interested in. If MS is moving to an open format, such as XML, it would be amazingly easier for anyone to reverse engineer the file format if they didn't have the schema, so there's really no point to not releasing it. Aside from that, Microsoft has said that they want Office to use XML so that it interoperates easier with webservices. While binary data can be sent, it would have to send the entire document. If the files were XML, however, specific information could be extracted and sent via a webservice, saving transport and processing time. Also, Microsoft is really putting developers first with it's new .NET initiative, which includes a heavy dose of XML. If MS didn't release the schemas for the Office document format, it would be far more difficult for developers to write applications that play nice with Office. I won't lie, I know a lot of it depends on speculation, but I think it's a relatively well thought out argument... what do you think? |
| #20 By 6253 (64.204.105.163) at 9/24/2002 8:53:00 PM |
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#24, the file format issue is a red herring. Competitors have been able to read and write the Office file formats for years. The key is what you do with the data. Providing the rendering, the editing functionality, the tools, the usability, etc. is the hard part.
This is easy to understand if you look at HTML. You can click View Source and in Internet Explorer and see every bit of the data which it is reading, but this doesn't make it easy to write a browser supporting everything that Internet Explorer supports. (Actually, you may also need to click View Files in the cache Settings to see "every bit.") Competitors are trading on the "theory" that everything is merely a matter of writing the code. That's absolutely true, but they're not being realistic and honest about how much effort that will take. Remember when Netscape first released their source code? Right at first, everybody theorized that people would be knocking out browser variants and fixing their own bugs in no time. After seeing the enormity of the actual code, people realized how big a deal these apps can be. In reality, they should have already known this; otherwise, there would have already been tons of Netscape-competitive knockoffs which didn't need Netscape's source code to begin with. |
| #21 By 6253 (64.204.105.163) at 9/24/2002 9:07:16 PM |
| #32, Microsoft publicly released the specification for the .DOC format a long time ago, beginning with Word 6.0 (the last 16-bit version) and updating it through Word 97. Microsoft didn't update it for the minor extensions in Word 2000 and 2002, and the old versions have since been pulled off the MSDN web site, but several sites still have it, such as http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~bob/Tech/wword8.html and http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=text |
| #22 By 1845 (12.254.162.111) at 9/25/2002 4:19:57 AM |
| hmm very good points holdup. |
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