Sat. May. 03, 2008
I took a number of liberties in preparing these cliffish notes for a blog posting (and comments) by Nicholas Carr about MSFT and GOOG and the future of office applications. I almost always like Nick's thinking because it is stimulating. However his writing suffers from bloat sometimes, so when he referenced Hamlet, the condensed version came to mind.
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Nick: Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo is longer than most Hamlet productions. Microsoft makes competitors' product's features of its own products, like Netscape's browser. Google is doing the same thing to Microsoft with office applications by making them part of their online services and getting other IT vendors to put them in their own IT applications. Google is less of a threat than Microsoft to these other companies, so they'll want to work with Google. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said , 'I like my enemy's enemy, so GOOG's my homey'. MSFT's Office profits will decline. MSFT may still own this business, but the business might suck.
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Comments follow
Joining Dots: MSFT is wrong to believe online office will cannibalize office sales. I blogged @ this here: http://tiny.cc/3Oqfl . And GOOG has its own problems with environments where ad revenue sucks. I blogged @ that too: http://tiny.cc/MRsZs
George Geist: There are a lot of versions of Hamlet!
Tom Lord: Nick, U did a 180 on me. Netscape makes me think of breakthrough, not beat down. Java's good, but it's not going to ace out traditional apps. SOA allows apps to leverage the cloud without depending on it. I'm thinking web apps are going to suck compared to traditional apps that leverage the web. What's that make office - the next breakthrough?
Phil Gilbert: What Joining Dots said. MSFT browser was put in a money makin' product and sucked the gravy from its competitor. So where's GOOG's meat?
Nick: "Where's GOOG's meat?" Ads and omnisciency. GOOG has a different gravy train, they make it the new fashioned way, indirectly.
Sprague Dawley: Nick u wrong. This is no David and Goliath, its Pogo Its MSFT's game to blow. An IBM/GOOG tag team is just two also-rans running a 3-legged race to nowhere. $40B for YHOO would draw down some serious cash, though.
SAM: Cloud apps don't interoperate. OpenOffice proved that's a big deal. Peeps might want to move, but there isn't anyplace to go. Nobody can afford cloud apps until their data files can go cleanly, without hassle. And when's that? Whoever gets the leg up on that one is the true lead dog. MSFT wants to tie everything into new-standard web 3.0 - that's why they want YHOO. We thought ODF was the way, but Sun sold us up the river when they did their $2B deal with MSFT. Now we're back at square one.
Markashton: U forget - MSFT can make Office online whenever they want. I think they'll make web-buddy apps, like they did with Outlook. GOOG's screwed, they can only go web-based and MSFT can go PC or hosted.
Patrick Farrel: Who M I 2 know, but who gives a rip about the OS? Office and interoperability are what matter. IT peeps know Win/Ofc, but GOOG can afford to hang. I don't trust GOOG yet to hold my valuables, but maybe some day. GOOG wins on the iPhone and the next coolest gadget, but I like Word on my PC.