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SOFTWARE INDUSTRY NEWS |
Overview of the Microsoft – Google Office and Cloud war |
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Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the availability of its Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, as well as Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 for businesses. Microsoft maintains that these define the future of productivity, even as that announcement was preceded by one from arch rival Google, touting Google Apps and the benefits of “real collaboration”. Google's move can be construed as a bid to leverage an unpassable opportunity for head to head publicity, which it did manage to achieve, given that the media worldwide picked up on the spat, and mushroomed it quickly into a well-covered war of words with each company trying to out-shout the other.  It all started when Matthew Glotzbach, Google's enterprise product management director urged users of previous versions of Microsoft's Office suite to consider the alternative of upgrading with Google Docs, and in the process hitting Microsoft where it hurts the most – its captive base of Office users wanting to move to Office 2010. Alex Payne, director of Microsoft's online product management team, fought back, saying that Google was trying to portray seamless use of Office with Google Docs, which in his opinion wasn't the case. Payne highlighted issues with file conversions between Office and Google documents, lost formatting and features when switching formats between Office and Google docs, and said Office 2010's Web Apps provided “more fidelity”. Google countered with its own statement to Computerworld, saying that Microsoft actively works to lock-in customers through its proprietary document formats, which only its own software renders in “true fidelity.” While Google showcased the success story of small business Smart Furniture as a reason for businesses to move to Google Apps and the cloud environment, Microsoft's blog posts talked about businesses leaving Google Apps as it was not “business ready”, had a “heritage in advertising” and even partners such as Capgemini were reverting to Microsoft's products, after trials and implementations with Google Apps.  Meanwhile, reports speculated about the uptake of Office 2010 by businesses. While some said Sharepoint 2010 becomes critical if businesses choose to integrate Web Apps, which themselves aren't free for businesses, others pointed out that integrating the free consumer version is an option, albeit one that IT security departments are not expected to embrace quickly given the idea of having business data saved on individual user's Windows Live SkyDrives. Still other reports quoted industry watchers and experts as saying that numerous organizations already running Office 2007 may well afford to skip an upgrade to Office 2010. For its part, in its latest Google Apps highlight, Google went ahead to showcase a new look for Google Calender, new themes for forms in Google Docs, Drag-and-drop for images in Gmail messages, and the opening of Google Voice to Students and Google Wave to a wider audience. Offering contextual gadgets from the Google Apps Marketplace, Google is now moving to include applications for project management, social networking, and numerous other things. It is also working to make new applications for businesses, schools and organizations, with Google Apps customers being able to sign into Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, Google Reader, AdWords and many more Google services with their Google Apps accounts. However, what is clear is that possibly for the first time, Microsoft is actually having to defend the Office product or space from credible competition in a changed (offline and online) landscape. The pressure is on Microsoft from the more recent successes of Oracle's (formerly Sun Microsystems') Open Office suite and the cloud niche being dominated for the most part by Google Apps, amongst other open source providers. Microsoft clearly knows that if it has to protect its Office turf, which reports said bring in almost a third of its revenues, it has to compete with rivals on both these fronts. Towards that end, Microsoft's web based offerings of a basic Office 2010 version online in the form of Web Apps are geared towards firing the first salvos on Google Apps dominance of the cloud Office space – Microsoft knows that a lot more needs to be done before it is able to secure its turf, but these events of the past month, in their most basic form, mark the beginning of the war for dominating the Office Space on the cloud. |
LISTS AND RESEARCH
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Global Software Top 100 - Edition 2011
- The Global Software Top 100 is a list of the world's largest software companies, ranked by annual software revenues. The list is based upon revenue information of 10,000+ IT companies worldwide.
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Software industry trends (2011)
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- Top hardware companies
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- What happens in the hardware industry?
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- IT services companies: healthy growth
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CRM companies: a short list
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- Top software companies in the US (2010)
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- U.S. software industry trends (2010)
- A research publication discussing the trends and the key players in the software industry in the United States. Posted 15 December 2010.
- Top companies in the world (not just software)
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