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Microsoft feeling Office heat? | |
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| Time: 18:07 EST/23:07 GMT | News Source: Business Week Online | Posted By: Brian Kvalheim | ||
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The company's decision to cut retail prices for some versions of its Office software is more a reaction to internal pressures than to outside competition, say analysts. Microsoft's decision to cut retail prices for some versions of its Office software is more a reaction to internal pressures than to outside competition, analysts said on Wednesday. The software giant announced Tuesday that it would trim the price of Office XP Standard and Office XP Professional by about 15 percent, with steeper cuts for standalone versions of the applications included in those packages--Word, Excel and so on. | ||
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| #1 By 8589 (64.219.163.151) at 5/29/2003 10:00:54 PM |
| Kevinu, don't worry about what the dorks think or say. They just can't help themselves. I mean, they are using Linsux, or a Mac-N-Trash, right? |
| #2 By 3653 (209.149.57.116) at 5/30/2003 12:21:31 AM |
| Hmm... Does JWM stand for Judge Wxxxx Motz? |
| #3 By 135 (208.50.204.91) at 5/30/2003 1:46:51 AM |
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JWM - "Whoever owns this format will own the industry."
I call that a scapegoat. We can do this, but it still won't be enough. To use Word as an example, the featureset of the app drives the doc format. If the app does not support 100% of the features of Word, users will never find it adequate to use with Word documents. That is the real problem. We already have good enough conversion, we already have ways to save documents in formats which are interoperable, but those are productivity killers not enhancers. They are worthless for a Business to pursue as a strategy. But just re-implementing the same functionality of Word is not going to be compelling to the marketplace. Woo hoo, you've built a version of Word which sells for $50 instead of $100, oh I'm so excited.... NOT! It's like trying to sell Postum to people used to drinking Coffee, yeah it tastes something like coffee but what's the bloody point? Microsoft Word took over a market which was dominated by WordPerfect. It *CAN* happen again. You want to replace Word, build something that is innovative, different, that just completely blows Word out of the water. The fact that Word must maintain backwards compatibility with it's file format, and it's user interface is it's weakness. I would have thought this was patently obvious. Personally I have a great many ideas of what I would love to see a next generation document creation tool do. I picture Visio, Excel, Word all combined into one. I picture the ability to remove itself from the limitations of keyboard and mouse and utilize hand gestures on say a large whiteboard or a tablet. I've seen bits and pieces of these over the years... I see this coming together in the next 5. You go to conferences talking about agile development practices and they recommend writing out your thoughts on a whiteboard and then taking a picture of it. It's far more efficient than drawing the same thing in Visio even if it doesn't look as pretty. Well guess what? There's a HUGE market there for a structured drawing tool that's actually easy to use, and Visio isn't meeting that need. At work we struggle with HTML presented in a web browser, and trying to present the same content on a written page via something like a PDF. There's gotta be a better way, right? I'll give you a hint as to what other company realizes some of these problems and is actively working to address them. It ain't StarOffice. It ain't Oracle. It ain't Apple. It isn't anything from the Open Source world. It starts with an M and ends with a T and frequently has a $ in the middle. You either Lead, Follow or Get Run Over. You've choosen the third option, sad to say. |
| #4 By 8273 (4.47.72.198) at 5/30/2003 3:06:28 AM |
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#4: Microsoft doesn't care about the consumer except as a way to make money.
And I suppose that SUN, Apple, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, etc. are simply there for the good will of humanity, to advance the state of man to a higher level without any thought as to their own benefit. Well, maybe some of them are there without a goal of making money looking at their bottom line, but if you think they exist to advance humanity, you really need a clue. If these companies have a motive other than to make money, it would be simply to put Microsoft out of business. The difference between MS and these companies is that MS goes about it by at least trying to give users what they want (granted, sometimes it is what MS thinks the user wants instead of what they ask for) through their products. The other companies do it by complaining. They complain when MS puts somebody out of business with a product that people use more than a competitor. But do you think that these companies would complain one bit if MS went out of buisness, and they were the only one left in their market? |
| #5 By 13998 (217.122.34.74) at 6/1/2003 4:28:31 AM |
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#6 Microsoft Word took over a market which was dominated by WordPerfect. It *CAN* happen again.
Of course it can happen again. In theory it is possible that Microsoft may go bancrupt, IBM may restart developing OS2 again and take over the desktop OS market, Netscape may come to life again and as a reborn hero may take over the browser market, Saddam may gather his forces again and fight back the US and take over the country. Though, in practice the story is a bit different. When Microsoft took over the word processing market, the world was not the world of today. Sharing data was at a very primitive level. Back then companies did not email word documents or excel sheets to their customers or didn't have a world-wide inranet where they stored these files and which they would have to convert to word document from word perfect documents. |
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