The Future of Microsoft Office
Productivity software forms the crux of daily tasks for many of today’s workers, no matter what field they find their employment in. The reigning king of productivity suites, Microsoft Office, is the market participant to beat, and Google is lining up to do just that.
As we take stock of the present, and look into the future, will Microsoft Office retain its throne, or will more nimble, lightweight online software take its place? It’s a billion dollar question, so let’s get started.
The Present:
Office 2010 has been an engine of growth for Microsoft since it came out in the middle of last year, driving up both profits and revenues. If Office 2007 was controversial, with its ‘Ribbon’ design interface, Office 2010 has managed to shake off that stigma and become a user favorite in homes and workplaces alike.
But Office 2010, and its sister suite Office 2011 for Mac, are hardly the only productivity products that Microsoft is hard at work on, even if they are the most popular and best known.
Office Live, Microsoft’s oldest ‘cloud’ productivity solution in its current form barely resembles its past. Born in 2006, around the time of Vista, Office Live was a tool for small businesses to get online. For free, a small company could get a half gigabyte of storage, 25 email accounts, corporate instant messaging, and a domain name. Obviously, it was a hit among ever-frugal minor enterprises.
But Microsoft had different plans for Office Live. The product was stripped of its small business focus, and the Office files that users had uploaded were moved to SkyDrive. In October of 2008, at the Professional Developers Conference in LA, Microsoft announced that Office Web Apps would be available through Office Live in the future. After a lengthy waiting period, in June of 2010, a mere eight days before the formal release of Office 2010, Office Web Apps went live.
The transition from Office Live being a small business resource into a consumer facing product that serves lightweight versions of the full offline Office suite was then complete. If you head to officelive.com now, you are greeted with a bold call to try out Office Web Apps. Office Live is now, to all intents and purposes, Cloud Office.
For reference, this is what Word in the cloud looks like:
It is a usable product, if you don’t need to do anything to complex, data intensive, or large. As with other cloud offerings, such as Google Apps (more on that later), Office Live is not a daily use suite for the professional in need of power.
Microsoft, however, has another iron in the fire. The small business aspects that once had a home in Office Live did not die off completely, but went into hibernation. In the last week, Microsoft released the hotly anticipated beta of Office 365, the spirit-child of the old Office Live, a new product that includes Exchange Server, SharePoint server, Lync server, and Office 201o. Its feature set is far richer than what was offered in the original Office Live line, but it comes with a price tag; Office 365 has no free tier, whereas the point of Office Live was its zero cost.
To quote Microsoft:
“Office 365 is the best of everything we know about productivity, all in a single cloud service. With Office 365, your local bakery can get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time, while a multinational pharmaceutical company can reduce costs and more easily stay current with the latest innovations. People can focus on their business, while we and our partners take care of the technology.”
Office 365 also includes a hosted version of Office Web Apps, bringing the cloud into the new small business suite. But for many companies, that might be somewhat troublesome if they are more conservative as to where employees can store and interact with data. Microsoft has a plan in place for that, allowing companies to host their own set of Office Web Apps on their internal SharePoint server. This is a middle solution, as using the internally hosted cloud apps away from the office carries technical difficulties.
To make it simple to understand, the following two slides are right out of the deck that Microsoft uses to pitch 365:
In typical form, adding complexity at every turn, Microsoft has manged to break its productivity products into three lines: the standard, local, Office suite of applications for OS X and Windows; Office Live with Office Web Apps where consumers can use their Live IDs and SkyDrive to host and edit documents and other files online; and Office 365, the small business solution that includes the best of Microsoft’s enterprise tools as at a lower price level, alongside hosted or self-hosted Office Web Apps.
If you didn’t get all of that, it’s fine, you don’t need to know each granular piece. Just understand that Microsoft is trying to reach all parts of the market with products that are tailored to fit. If in fact they can pitch the correct product to the correct channel, Microsoft’s strategy could be quite successful. If not, Microsoft might have spent untold sums on more than one albatross.
