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Challenging Microsoft on the Desktop
Dotnaught writes "As Microsoft moves to offer software-as-a-service with Windows Live, online companies are moving to challenge Microsoft on the desktop. In a decision that would have been seen as foolish a few years ago, file sharing and social networking company TransMedia plans to release desktop productivity apps (in conjunction with online ones) as lightweight Microsoft Office alternatives. Google, meanwhile, through its deal with Intuit, is colonizing desktop apps as it has done with browsers and search toolbars. Microsoft used to have a home field advantage on the desktop, thanks to Windows. Lately, operating system ownership is looking a lot less valuable."
I have so many things I use, it'll be nice to try some new stuff in there, and see if some of the existing software gets displaced in my preferences, for something better.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Wow, I guess you're the coolest kid on the block now!
I don't see how this is unique threat to M$ either. From TFA's first sentence (underlining mine): A year after the release of its suite of online integrated media-sharing and social networking applications, Glide Effortless, TransMedia is redoubling its effort to challenge Apple, Microsoft, MySpace, and Google.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
There is not a chance in hell I would use an online app for something that runs fine on my local pc. Why add an unneeded security risk?
>>Lately, operating system ownership is looking a lot less valuable.
This could not have been true-er. First, I substituted MS Office with OpenOffice*. After Google came out with spreadsheet and document solutions of its own, I do not even use OpenOffice anymore. What more, it does not matter anymore if I am on Windows XP or Ubuntu or Suse - as long as I have a relatively mainsteam browser with me, I am good to go.
*I am talking about my home environment where I do not user "Office" applications that heavily, and online solutions available to me satisfy ALL my needs.
Most Windows users don't understand what an operating system is or where the boundaries between the operating system, its desk top, and its application might be.
Even the ones who know they run "Windows XP" as opposed to some other version don't know what that means. They do know and use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access. Why do they know ? Because they start those applications frequently and a splash screen tells them what they are running. The equivalent to the splash screen for the operating system is only shown at startup, and most people neither reboot regularly nor pay attention when they do.
My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.
If I am right, competing with MS in the application space will be a lot harder than competing in the OS space, and we all know how successful competitors have been in the OS space.
Seems that **anything** that runs ON windows contributes to Windows "dominance"
right?
I'm actually glad things are moving up in the industry -- as long as different companies choose to pick one specialization and strive to make the market place fairer, the existence of monopolies like Microsoft will be threatened.
What I do not like to see, however, is that most companies that do so play catch up and do not even provide a better user experience for the users, making it harder for the already comfortable users to make the switch.
Just get the price down on those fiber optics and we'll see. Na'h wait, I'll be able to cvsup a brillion times faster then, forget it.
I find it hard to consider this seriously when the CEO's bio reads:
"Mr. Leka established strategic partnerships with industry leaders including Apple Computer and Microsoft and throughout the HealthSCOUT Syndicated Network of over 3,000 sites (e.g. Yahoo, USA Today, NBCi, iWon, Juno, AT&T, Prodigy). Previously, Mr. Leka was a co-founder and Executive Director of The Fultz Foundation in Washington, DC where he was instrumental in securing funding from the George Soros Foundation and USAID among others. Mr. Leka developed and directed various international projects focused on business development and management training including telecommunications and the internet." http://www.transmediacorp.com/about/board.htm
Sounds like he's successful at shaking money out of wealthy people's pocket because http://www.fultzfoundation.org/ is little more than a placeholder and the dot-bomb marketing speak is so 1998.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I don't understand, what do Eskimos have to do with desktop applications? ... Oh. Intuit! Sorry.
As long as the premiere system for this software is MS, all the companies will loss to MS over the long haul. For example, Intuit owned the personal desktop money management. Now, MS Money is the current winner. The only thing that keeps Intuit alive is their tax software. Once they lose dominance on it, the company will be gone. The best thing for all these companies is to move to Apple and OSS (particularly Linux).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Many vendors could easily out-do MSFT in application space. MSFT did not get its marketshare and lead by simple technical superiority of its product or coding skills. It got it by better business tactics. Infact every flag ship product that is minting money for MSFT started out as a pale copy of some other better program. WordPerfect, QuattroPro/Lotus, Harvard Presentation Graphics, Dbase/Foxbase etc. Then the marketing muscle, clever tricks to prevent interoperability, agreements with vendors to throttle competition and naivity of its user base that confused interoperability with PC-compatibility got MSFT the market share and lead. If the OS advantage is removed and the playing field is leveled by demanding true interoperability and compatibility to standards, (standards not wholly owned and manipulated by MSFT) you will see what other vendors are truly capable of.
The key is Open STANDARDS. Do not confuse it with Linux/Mac/Unix or Open Source or Free Software or Gnu or GPL. If the users demand true portability of their data and their applications the playing field will be leveled. My docment, my macros, my scripts are mine. I want them to work whether I choose to run MSOffice or OpenOffice. Only when owners of the data assert their ownership and refuse to be locked into a particular vendor's format the playing field will be level.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Lately, operating system ownership is looking a lot less valuable.
Yay, Netscape!!!
Oh. Wait...
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Why I'm sticking with MS Office (97):
- It still works with people using Office 2003
- It doesn't take a registration key
- The CD is quite easy to copy for friends and family
- The built-in VB stuff is completely (safely) broken when you just run it off a file share
- It never phones home (and there's no Internet component)
- It installs in under 100MB
- If any new features have been introduced since 1997, I don't need them
- It doesn't try to figure out my advertising profile from the documents I work with
Cause lord knows if you add the instability of web interfaces to MS's track record, you're in for lots and lots of "save now" or risk losing your document. The best part about going web-based is that burried in the ToS, I bet there's something about "can't assure constant connection". This leaves MS plenty of room to sa, "not our problem" and take your money anyway.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
But why should Microsoft care? There aren't enough OOo or WordPerfect users out there for their voices to add up to anything more than a fringe. What is needed first is for people to become less fearful of using non-Microsoft software...but every time something fails to render properly, people run back to what they were using for years.
Palm trees and 8
> The best thing for all these companies is to move to Apple and OSS (particularly Linux).
Not really, a 5 percent market share on the Windows platform beats 100% share on OSX/LINUX, and the LINUX market is still hampered by the stigma of being the platform that people associate with free software. Seriously, how many of the folks here running LINUX have spent a $200 bucks on a software package?
There will be no more operating systems on users machines...
You will boot flash memory
Your machine will go to MS
Your machine will then run what MS thinks you need
Your machine will tell MS where you went and what you downloaded
Your machine will tell the NSA where you went and what you downloaded
Your machine will stop error when your isp has a hickup
Your machine has MS
--
Stupid people should not breed
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
Kind of like WordPerfect was an imitation of WordStar. 1-2-3 was an imitation of VisiCalc. Etc. The reality is, is that while Microsoft's products are far from perfect, in many cases they really are better. Over time Microsoft really does get shit done. It's the advantage of having operating capital and being able to take the time to build good products.
My assertion is that a corporate IT department could substitute any operating system and users would barely notice as long as they could continue to use Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, and Access.
To tone it down a little, I'd say that surely they'd notice that there was a difference insofar as the UI was different. However, it is true that:
Further, I'd say you could substitute Office with OOo/Evolution, and again, they'd notice the difference. In reality some users would object purely on brand loyalty, and some would be jealous of people who had MS Office because of the fact that it costs $500, and how much money IT spends on you is a status thing. Seriously, I've had users complain that they need the Pro version of Office even though they only ever use Excel, Word, and Outlook.
But, similar to the OS, most users would only care to the degree that it didn't behave the way they'd expect.
Users who use lots of MS Word features would be annoyed because menu items have moved. I've known users to get pissed off at new versions of MS Office for this reason, though the annoyance is offset by the status symbol thing (getting Office XP while their coworkers have 2000 makes people happy). Users who use Word just to type things up, never using any specific features or even formatting their docs, however, won't care.
Well, except that's not exactly true, because it's usually the people who are most unable to use these apps that are most interested in having the newest/coolest/most expensive version. It's probably the boss's nephew who doesn't do anything who will end up being the first person to "need" the upgrade to Office 2007 Super Ultimate Edition.
Ha ha. Funny you say that. Look into Alaskan Native Corporations then laugh if you can.
When Word out did WordPerfect, it was through bundling it with OS, getting steep discounts on the price of OS to the OEM installers if they DONT install or sell WordPerfectb by throttling the revenue stream of WordPerfect by leveraging MSFT's monopoly in the OS space. That is how it won. And what happens after it wins? Just look at IE after it won the war with Netscape. Just look at the price increase in MsOffice while the hardware prices dropped by orders of magnitude. Starting from a pale imitation of a competing software is not the bad part. It is killing a superior product with underhand tactics that hurts us users. All of us.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'd remote log into my PC in that case.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I think its time someone made a Windows lookalike package for people wanting to change to Linux.
...Microhard windows...or maybe Microhard Doors, or wait! wait! Megahard Doors! that's it!
They could call it something similar, like
"Tired of Microsoft Windows' lack of security? Try out our free Megahard Doors (tm) operating system for increased security!"
MS is making a big mistake with SAaS offerings. I buy it, I own it (in an everyman's fantasy). They talked me into having my own servers to run a business and now I'm gonna want to use theirs! Get real Microsoft.
"Direct threats require decisive action. " Dick Cheney
The only thing that keeps Intuit alive is their tax software.
As much as I despise the program, Quickbooks has a pretty huge installed base. Not to mention all the obnoxious nickle-and-diming they like to do for "added value" (payroll, merchant accounts, etc.)
I think slashcode should automagically post a first post ... nobody likes being #2
I agree with some of the previous comments that many users are running MSFT Office because they're familiar with the products and, right now, they have to be running Windows to use those products (okay, WINE users aside). Where I see the blurring between desktop and internet apps having the most impact is at the low end of the PC market. A $125.00 laptop...or whatever the $100.00 laptop is up to now...would stand to benefit greatly from the availability of online applications.
It may not make a big dent in the US market for some time, but the combination of low cost hardware and online applications in emerging markets would be more immediate and significant. And it does at least hint at the ability to raise the productivity potential of thin clients and extend the life of low end PC's. It may be revolutionary here and there without changing much here. What an interesting possibility.
Should be really interesting to see how MSFT positions Windows for online applications. If you have to be running Windows to run Office Live, it'll be the worst of both worlds.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I keep my car service schedule in Google Spreadsheets so my mechanic can log in and see when core parts were last changed or maintained. I use Writely to compose blog posts and note down useful information for later retrieval. I use Google Calendar so I can add events whenever I get a message rather than just at home. Thats what Onlline apps are for. use-anywhere.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
As someone who sets up / builds PCs, I've found that if you change the icon on Firefox to use the iexplore icon, and rename the shortcut to OpenOffice Calc to say "Excel", people will use it, and they won't even notice most of the time that its a different application.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Whenever they go try to take over a new market, someone tries to poach the last market they came in and took over! When will people just leave them alone!??oneone!!
Oh my! ...
... DRM, spam, and the like.
Maybe Google can teach Intuit how not to be evil.
Are those crickets I hear?
A lot of Linux distros come with OOo installed by default, don't they? If you're getting the same thing free with your free operating system, why replace it with a $200 program?
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Ultimately, these people are still running Windows. And Microsoft has been caught in the past. They could just add more undocumented features in their browser and make it more stable or whatever.
The pull of Microsoft is it's stability and the way everything fits together. Another online app might not be enough on its own to challenge Microsoft anywhere.
Then again, as we move further into the Internet age, and the people are more and more Internet oriented, it could be people will specifically want online apps, or dumb terminals just to play games.
Have you read my journal today?
The point I'm trying to make is that there is almost an expectation that software on LINUX is free, which doesn't exactly endear to commercial software developers who want to *SELL* something!
But why should Microsoft care? There aren't enough OOo or WordPerfect users out there for their voices to add up to anything more than a fringe. What is needed first is for people to become less fearful of using non-Microsoft software...but every time something fails to render properly, people run back to what they were using for years.
I know it sounds strange applied to MS, but the market responds to customers. A lot of customers want the advantages of open standards and are tired of promises to bring those advantages without the standards themselves, something MS has promised and failed to deliver repeatedly. If governments, organizations, and companies continue the trend of demanding support for open standards in office documents, then MS will have to comply, or lose increasingly large chunks of the market. Either way, the lock-in is broken and then it is just the best product that wins.
Just as MS has been taking over Quicken by offering Money for free on Windows (until it was established), MS will be offering low-cost to free business software. All of it will be funded by their monopoly. That will allow them to kill off the compitition and then jack the price. Sadly, far too many of our businesses think short-term rather than long-term. By the time Intuit decides to move to Linux, the OSS world will have a decent and free solution. It will be hard to compete. Think of AOL. They are only now realizing that they have competed themselves away and are now re-doing themselves in a way that gets rid of all of their value. Had they been smart, they would have supported Linux, even offering a free Linux install with a AOL hook-up. Once they had a user converted to Linux, it would have been much harder for the user to move to a different hook-up (now it is easy).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1) There are more desktop apps than just office. A lot more. It only takes one must-have windows-only app to kill the deal for any alternative OS.
2) Aside from running apps that most desktop users want, windows also works with the hardware that most users want: multi-function printer/scanner/copier things, win-modems, ipods, etc.
3) Lots of popular web site will not work correctly on anything except msie.
4) DRM & multi-media.
As much as I dislike msft, I prefer to be realistic and admit that linux has no chance of being popular on the desktop for the forseeable future.
Maybe I was in the minority, but using Word on Windows was a better experience than using Wordperfect. The first WP windows port (Hidden Codes and such) was very poor.
Just like the news that "Online apps are the future and are working, no more Microsoft Office!"... New were if you make a comparison...
Something like, Google had good chances winning this sector since is very popular and have better comercial chances (on his web search engine) that's more visited than Microsoft's Portal.
ghostbar page.
People who think Netscape 4 was superior to IE 4 are in denial. People who think Netscape 4 was superior to IE 5 were even worse. I don't remember IE6 being that huge a leap from IE 5.5, but it's been a few years and at the time, anything coming out of the Mozilla side was completely unusable for normal people, though I used Mozilla as my primary browser from about Milestone 6 or 7 on.
For all I know, IE7 will be better than Firefox, again, because Firefox has its problems too (though I'm addicted to adblock).
Word took over from WordPerfect because Word was a Windows app that did WYSIWYG while Windows was taking off like crazy while WordPerfect thought that a console app was good enough for anyone.
I also notice you didn't mention Excel, given that every other spreadsheet program in existence nowadays pretty much clones it.
I often hear of the Chicken and the Egg analogy used to explain why companies don't develop software for Linux. Perhaps this is the egg being laid. Trueth is, web apps, even those made by MS are good for Linux because they are always cross platform. Not to mention the fact that over the past few years linux has gone from being a difficult to use OS with little software avalible to it to becoming a high powered, easy to use OS with thousands and thousands of apps avalible for it. Years ago, I wouldn't have been able to play music, read office documents, browse SMB shares, watch DVDs, dial in a modem, use wifi or possably even print stuff. Now that is easily accomplished. Open Office, Gaim, Firefox, VLC, Libdvdcss2, and thousands of other programs have helped linux beyond belief. Interestingly enough, FOSS and open standards are actually helped by being used by people on Windows and Mac. Take Open Office, if more people use it, ODT gets more popular. Firefox has been a huge example of this. When I started using FF nobody seemed to support it because it had a low market share. Once it gained market share most web sites started to support it. Because FF is natively on Lin and Win it helped lin to have more people support a nonIE browser. Keep in mind, unlike windows, Linux is noncommercial. Linux doesn't need the desktop market to servive. It doesn't need to be good enough for you and me. It needs to be good enough for those who write it. This may sound bad, but it is actually good. It means it will give us a realistic chance to develop and we can't go out of buisness. In adition to all the Web apps, native ports, and alternativeware, we have wine. Wine can run most windows stuff pretty well and it is a nice option to have. It also helps people port software to linux.
The Gospel according to lolcat
How many people on home desktops have dropped 200 dollars on a single application? Very few, most of them and half the businesses pirate or do without, because 200 bucks is insane for digital bits. 20 bucks maybe, 200 is just lame, and the world is noticing this and has reacted accordingly. Just like the movie and music people are gougers, so follows expensive software. Back when there were at most a few thusand programmers of note on the planet, expensive software made sense. Today? It is falling to fewer and fewer niche markets, and even there the cheaper/free versions (and capital F free) are gradually gaining strength. Software is the tool to go do business with, it is becoming less of a business in and of itself, even though some buggywhip business coders want to stay in the 20th century and their glory dotbomb years. We have millions of coders a *year* now entering the workplace around the planet, it is becoming a commodity semi skilled construction type job, it is no longer leet, ergo, prices will drop and salaries will keep dropping. There will be a plateau where it stabilises somewhat, but the trends are clear,*abundantly and overwhelmingly clear*, it is time to start thinking about this selling code to make a living deal. Using the code to make a living in some other real business, sure, selling the code? Good luck, I give it at most ten years or so before it really starts to crash. We'll have over a hundred million coders then and just a huge backlog of already written code that does what people want. There's just so much drop shading that people will pay for, or just so much "wow, this office application will synch my lawnmower with the dictionary through text messaging via skypegooglechat presentation! And it's only 200$!" that people really want or need.
Want a bad car analogy? Sure you do! How much more crap can you hang onto and off a car before even a ricer won't pay the money for it? Once he has tall tires and a chrome wing and spinner wheels and a sound system with it's own diesel generator and a custom aztec warrior paint job with flames and zebra skinned interior and a GPS enabled rear view mirror..I mean, how much more do the aftermarket guys expect from a car consumer?
Code-applications and the OS-has hit that point now, it is bling city and rapidly approaching utter ridiculousness. In fact, I say it hit that point around 3 years ago. Even the extremely near sighted and insane RIAA knows they can't sell a plastic disk with music on it for 50 bucks, yet for some reason coders think that the planet will just keep wanting to pay for more and more shiny on top of more and more shiny.
Here's a hint-it isn't happening. Vista will prove it, it will be the biggest flop ever and you'll see investors starting to bail out of software stocks-including MS- soon thereafter.
> Seriously, how many of the folks here running LINUX have spent a $200 bucks on a software package?
Me personally or my workplace. Personally the biggest ticket purchase has been $100 for a copy of VMWare 1.0 obtained at a special price at a trade show when it first appeared. Lots of smaller purchases though, especially when Loki was still alive and kicking.
Here at work though we will write a check if it is the only way to get the job done. Hell, we got in as a beta site on our library automation and still spent an unholy amount of money. (Not sure if I can disclose the amount, being that it was a special dealas part of being a beta site. Don't have the paperwork to hand at the moment, but lets just say that it was a fair number of kilobux.) And for the first few years after converting our patron lab we offered Win95 via VMWare. Yes we got Edu pricing but two dozen licenses weren't exactly pocket change. Nowadays we cover the IE compatibility problem with CrossOver Office. Ok, perhaps I could have got Wine to do it but time had run out on me.
But yes, if a Free product is available for a purpose I'll tend to prefer it over a commercial product, even when the commercial product is 'better.' Because the commercial product probably won't be around in five years and unless it writes to a standard format it will take all my data with it. A commercial product will also frequently require tossing additional cash at to get bug fixes. Combined with most Linux ports of commercial products being red headed stepchildren it just doesn't make sense to buy the stuff if a choice is available.
So yes commercial vendors, you can get money from me but you have to either have me over a barrel or actually show me real longterm VALUE. I think in terms of next decade not next month unless I'm just buying a game for home use.
Democrat delenda est
"When Word out did WordPerfect, it was through bundling it with OS, getting steep discounts on the price of OS to the OEM installers if they DONT install or sell WordPerfectb by throttling the revenue stream of WordPerfect by leveraging MSFT's monopoly in the OS space"
WordPerfect lost in the marketplace long before it was common to bundle applications with a computer. They lost because their product and their company (WordPerfect Corp - 2 owners ago) had a philosophy that was in conflict with the new trend in GUI based applications. They didn't even have a menu on DOS until very late in the game.
Their selling point was that WordPerfect was like a clean piece of paper with nothing on it. For those who did nothing but write documents in WordPerfect all day and could leverage the effort to learn the keyboard commands it was OK. With the shift from clerical work done by secretaries to clerical work performed by the rank and file, a quick learning curve was essential.
They also fought tooth-and-nail against their customers desire to have a Windows version of WordPerfect, and when it finally came out they insisted on using their old DOS printer drivers instead of using the standard Windows ones. I personally crashed it in the first 15 min of use.
And I can't remember a situation in which I was without net acess for more than one or two days, and very sporadically (not more than once or twice a year).
If you take into account that most of my life has been spent in developping countries, then the above anecdote is more interesting.
And since I have been in the UK I have not been without net access at all for the last 8 years. Not even a single day.
So I frankly fail to see your point.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The bad reputation they would create would kill them commercially.
And lets not even mention lawsuits.
Well, what the heck, lets do it: lawsuits.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I gather you're joking, but these people still need to be able to make spreadsheets and read other people's word-processing documents.
with challenging microsoft desktop apps? Specifically office? Trying to build a better office suite than microsoft is kind of a futile effort... One more crappy word processor that reads .doc format isn't going to unseat the whole office suite. Microsoft has saturated the market *fully*. Office is microsoft's single most successful product, even more successful than windows since most mac users use office, and some linux users use office through wine.
If developers really want to get people to use open source software, or any kind of software that they write, they should focus on writing software that people need, but *don't* already have access to, instead of making the Nth substandard clone of some software that everyone already has.
What's trollish about this? Sorry, at work so have to be AC.
That was pretty damn well argued. Try reading it again mods.