That video alone pretty much says it all. It isn’t about the word processor, or the device, it’s just about writing what you want when you want and how you want. The old legacy mindset of an installed word processor is a bit feeble these days. Especially considering the integrity of Google Docs vs. Microsoft Word. Don’t even get me started on how flimsy Excel is. The old installed application sweet of several hundred Megabytes just doesn’t hold up for an fast paced, quickly adaptive, thought leader style business. Microsoft said it best in the old wars between WordPerfect and Word, even though WordPerfect (which I think version 9 or 11 or something is STILL more feature rich than Word) had tons of more features, Microsoft stated frequently that 80-90% of users never used those features.
Now we’re in a situation were 80-90% of people don’t use the features in Word, and it costs a lot of cash versus the free offering from Google Docs. Funny how the tides turn to throw Microsoft’s won words back at the company.
Some may be screaming at this point, “nobody is going to dump Word & the Office Suite”. Again, the same thing was said about WordPerfect in the late 90′s. Does anyone still use it? Maybe 1-2% of the market?
Other people may also argue, “but all of the programmable extensible… [fill in some form of extending Office here] …stuff for Office makes it immensely valuable!” Maybe, but it is a small subset of users that actually use addons to their Microsoft Office Suite. In addition, most developers don’t want to touch Office addons at all, they’d rather the suite languish than to develop to the jumbled chaos that is the Microsoft Office Suite Addons and such.
But I digress, one might say, “you’re just biased and don’t like the Microsoft Office Suite”… and I’d say you got me there! I’m guilty. Over the years Microsoft has made billions of dollars on this suite. By proxy they’ve then dumped billions of dollars into software development and other things. However, people really shouldn’t be spending vast sums of money on something that should – and will – become a commodity software product over the next 1-5 years. As Enterprises realize they can easily provide word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software for small percentages of what Microsoft does the transitions should continue to occur.
Microsoft even seems convinced of this and started making the move with Office 365 + SaaS based Office provision on Windows Live. I don’t wish the company ill will of any sort, so hopefully they’ll pull out of their software nose dive with the SaaS offering.
(Cross-posted @ Composite Code)
Agreed. Information technology teams have two choices – embrace the future that is already here or loose credibility as other business units get there first. It is human nature to avoid change but executives are paid to lead not maintain the status quo.
Too many IT teams are stuck in the product mindset. Will 8 of 10 people be just fine utilizing Docs instead of Word? Absolutely, but I’m sure the case could be laid out that Office is still a wise investment. That case would have to be word processor vs word processor or spreadsheet vs spreadsheet. However Google Docs is not a product, it is a service – specifically part of the Google Apps services.
We often compare Docs to Word or Gmail to Exchange but this fails to capture the reality of Google Apps. The service includes email, instant messaging, voice/video chat, spam/virus protection, disaster recover, mobile, calendaring, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, forms, drawings, intra/extranet site creation/hosting, video hosting/sharing, document management, and literally dozens of additional services. No hardware or software required.
Word vs Docs and Microsoft could have a case, but that’s not the reality of the contest. Let the finance department keep Excel, but 100% of enterprises should absolutely be taking advantage of the Google Apps suite in part or whole to efficiently enable additional services across their organizations. The only part of the service that actually requires IT is messaging – Gmail, Calendar, Talk – the rest of the services can be utilized at any time by any business unit with no need for IT. IT either owns Google Apps (as the administrator for services for the domain) internally or, for better or worse, business units will simply go around them.
Don’t you think more people will use office.live.com instead of Google docs? Microsoft office’s basics, online, and free. I think Google got there first, but Microsoft has familiarity working on its side.
Sigmoid – Well, the online version of Microsoft’s docs are pretty decent, however they offer less functionality than Google Docs unless you use the client software – i.e. the full office version. In addition there are still browser and other compatibility issues. Just watch that video and you’ll see what I mean. Try doing what they do in the video with Google Docs, with any device, and you’ll immediately notice that you can’t do a number of those things with the Office Live Versions.
In addition Office Live is vastly more expensive. Microsoft expects their customers to roll blindly along at $5-6 bucks per customer, when Google Docs is much less. There will be some serious competition between the two over the next couple of years. Unless Microsoft just retreats from their pricing range they are attempting to keep to parallel the boxed versions revenue of Office, they’re starting at a significant disadvantage in the price realm.
Also, what JoeTierney wrote is absolutely true. Google is just a completely new paradigm. It’s more than just the mere one or two tools. The entire set of tools they offer really enable a company in greater length then the existing Office Suite. Especially for web workers out there with multiple devices, multiple computers, and always on the move. Those people are the primary user base for Office Apps.