Comments on: Microsoft Office Online and Attacking The Innovator’s Dilemma

By: » A new player to the desktop RIA playground? freewizard

» A new player to the desktop RIA playground? freewizard — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:32:27 +0000

[...] Google has showed up its achievement of WebKit engine embedding. After Adobe AIR, Mozilla Prism and some announcement from m$, the search giant maybe also silently joined the Desktop RIA game. Will the gears finally [...]

By: BalonStar

BalonStar — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:54:57 +0000

Microsoft and Google are silently clashing in business.

By: Why Chrome OS Now? Because Microsoft Office In The Cloud Comes Monday.

Why Chrome OS Now? Because Microsoft Office In The Cloud Comes Monday. — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:43:56 +0000

[...] Almost immediately following the Chrome OS announcement, Robert Scoble took to his favorite home on the web, FriendFeed, to have one of his, I-know-something-you-don’t-know “discussions.” During the course of those “discussions,” Scoble gave dropped quite a few hints about what Microsoft planned to announce on Monday, including “Diego, no, it’s one of Microsoft’s primary businesses. Did you know Microsoft has 14 billion dollar businesses?” Guess what that is? Microsoft Office. [...]

By: Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011 | The Scripts Zone

Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011 | The Scripts Zone — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:01:19 +0000

[...] a great way to open the door wide open to competitors with more innovative business models. But the Innovator’s Dilemma problem doesn’t necessarily apply to the music industry. The big labels have a lock on [...]

By: Reflexology London

Reflexology London — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:33:24 +0000

Yes ! Microsoft will follow up in the path of Google. This is when it will become interesting. A Real clash of the titans.
We all know open source has already won.
It just needs to be user friendly

By: האם מייקרוסופט בדרך להשיק גרסה אינטרנטית של אופיס? | עוגיות - בלוג על אינטרנט

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:58:39 +0000

[...] במהלך הימים הקרובים. הדיווח הוביל כמובן לשרשרת תגובות ופרשנויות ברחבי הבלוגוספירה. נדמה כי זירת התוכנות המשרדיות עוברת [...]

By: Showcase d’applications Silverlight at Silverlight, Aps.Net 3.5, LINQ et les nouvelles technologies Web de Microsoft

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:11:06 +0000

[...] support offline permettra à Silverlight d’être un concurrent de Adobe AIR, et SilverLight 2.0 sera alors le [...]

By: Najveća dilema u IT-u: inovatorova dilema « SoftBiz Blog

Najveća dilema u IT-u: inovatorova dilema « SoftBiz Blog — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:45:56 +0000

[...] dana i TechCrunch piše o tome kako se Microsoft suočava s inovatorovom dilemom. O čemu se tu radi? Što je to u toj [...]

By: Google, online ads and the economy

Google, online ads and the economy — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:29:13 +0000

[...] company. An online advertising company to be specific. Sure it has other things going, it’s hosted apps are doing pretty well and it’s struggling to find it’s hook into offline advertising – but as of now they [...]

By: Dave Malhotra

Dave Malhotra — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:28:52 +0000

The reason Salesforce probably didn’t get sold and is having a hard time now is that the economy is slowing and all the potential buyers know they can get it cheaper down the road. Their valuation is sky-high and can’t stand in a bear market.

By: Phil Dewey

Phil Dewey — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:58:12 +0000

Michael, don’t count Cisco out in the SalesForce sweepstakes. Rumor has it they had a deal lined up at the end of last year that didn’t quite take off, hence the tin cupping at Larry’s place

By: Phil Dewey

Phil Dewey — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:55:24 +0000

@34 Mark Ashton – there are only 12 basic problems in computer science. Each generation solves them over again and, in the process, renames them and considers themselves brilliant for doing so. We did that too…

By: Jason Harrop

Jason Harrop — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:21:45 +0000

“users like free, and they like the ability to collaborate on documents”

There are various ways Microsoft can deliver on these requirements.

As I discuss in my blog entry at http://dev.plut...ce-online-soon/ I wonder whether this will extend to Mac OSX and Linux clients?

My guess is Mac: yes, Linux: no (or at least no fanfare – even if Silverlight on Linux soon makes this possible).

We’ll see.

By: Microsoft News Tracker

Microsoft News Tracker — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:12:05 +0000

Microsoft to place big bet on Web apps?…

Nicholas Carr is providing this weekend’s Microsoft buzz with a rumor that Microsoft is getting ready to roll out a Web apps strategy if not necessarily any actual apps:
Put your ears to the ground, my friends, for the Beast of Redmond may be s…

By: Mark Ashton

Mark Ashton — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:09:14 +0000

The current fascination with everything Web is humerous. For those of us who are old enough (not THAT old…mid 40’s) to remember using mainframes or mini’s, we remember what it was like having all of the data stored in centralized machines and accessing that data from dumb terminals. I have news for you: the Web apps you’re all drooling over are the modern day equivalent. Sure, they’re somewhat better (AJAX! WOW! NEATO!). We’re starting to see some offline capabilities (gee…not a new idea) but they’re still all pretty lame compared to a good Mac or PC application. The sad thing is that the reason we’re in this situation is that Macs and PCs are so hard to maintain and update and data stored on them isn’t available everywhere and the apps that run on them aren’t available everywhere. Well, we might as well just give up, right?

Well, no. Maybe smart people can solve the problems with PC/Mac’s and even smart phones and then we can actually USE some of the trillions of dollars that we’ve invested in local processing power. What a thought. Some of these problems shouldn’t be that hard to fix. For example, as storage gets cheaper and bandwidth increases and synchronization technology improves it shouldn’t be that hard to maintain copies of my data in lots of places…on my laptop, my Mac desktop at home, my phone and on the Web. Then if I change a file using one of those devices it gets updated everywhere. Not a huge challenge. The bigger challenge is doing the same things with applications. If I have an application on one machine, shouldn’t I be able to use that same application when I’m using other machines? Not an insurmountable hurdle.

I guess I’m an optimist. I think smart people can figure out a way to give me the superior experience that I get using my Mac or PC or iPhone AND the things that the Web is good at: storing data and letting people and applications access and use it. I can tell you one thing for sure. I have much higher aspirations for my computing life than Google Apps. Reminds me way too much of using an IBM mainframe 25 years ago.

By: damon

damon — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:35:06 +0000

to #30, and you have never done contracts, customers return things in umpteen ways, and almost never with track changes … most common is a 2nd file, then the most common is yet another doc with a list of requested changes …

Anyway, just as with the book, there is no convincing the company/market/space/people that are being dilimma’d, at least until its too late.

Again, this book is a great great read, especially for technology people.

By: John

John — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:42:10 +0000

Mike, I think you might want to check those numbers again… seems a bit difficult to believe that Google Apps & Docs is doing $400M / year. Are you sure your contact did not include Google’s total enterprise revenue (e.g., enterprise search, search appliances) in that number as well?

By: liquidboy

liquidboy — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:34:31 +0000

There are alot of amazing features that are just too difficult to find, that’s what the ribbon is designed for to expose alot of the cool features that make word what it is to the general user.

Just because you use 1% doesnt mean that the other 99% is useless, eg mail merge stuff, graphic annotations, templates, themes ….

also you 1% is not another person’s 1%, when you add up all the potential users of online apps MS will probably require 50% functionality to meet the needs of all users (hypothetical, just proving a point)…

online apps are reaching a fork in the road where they will be as rich and quick as desktop apps (not 100% but nearly there)…

Microsoft’s approach in there new technologies (including Silverlight) has this in mind and anyone that has followed the SL development track can see this..

By: Brandon Paddock

Brandon Paddock — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:37:50 +0000

Damon -

If you have “contracts1.doc” and “contract2.doc” that were different versions of the same contract, you obviously don’t know how to use Word.

I mean come on… “Track Changes” has been around for ages.

By: Amy

Amy — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:56:01 +0000

Mike –

If you didn’t have time to do a side-by-side comparison of Google Apps to MS Office, your readers would have been better served to be pointed here: http://www.read...p#comment-47436

Google may be generating decent revenue off their apps, but I agree with this poster – when was the last time you were using Word and said, “gee, this would be a great application if only it had advertising in it.” You get (or don’t get) what you pay for.

By: Fonda Wilcox

Fonda Wilcox — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:50:34 +0000

If Microsoft is going to move in this direction they should improve their MS Live spaces etc… sites to obtain the confidence of its consumers FIRST because at the moment these services are not up to par!
Perhaps they should consider buying Pageflakes and integrate this platform to help them with this endeavor.
My two pesos….

By: damon

damon — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:20:53 +0000

to #26

We use google docs for everything, including contracts. We don’t email contracts around anymore, we share them. All versions tracked. No more contract1.doc, contract2.doc, contract80.doc in everyones filesystem and email.

And we don’t even smoke pot.

Perhaps you should get your head out of the sand or elsewhere.

By: ionix5891

ionix5891 — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:12:52 +0000

Yet more un -researched rubbish about AIR and Silverlight,

techcrunch monkey writers didnt get their bannanas today did they?

As for offline office apps being the next best think stop smoking pot!

seriously has anyone used GoogleDocs for any lenght of time? its plagues with issues and i have a semi-decent Internet connection

By: Upanisad

Upanisad — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:07:45 +0000

Please, stop this pathetic online office applications hype!They’ll never catch on, just like Net PCs and many other flops in recent IT history. (They’re flawed in the same way)
MS has nothing to bo worried about. Desktop Office program will always have 90% and more of the office market. And saying that Google Apps is somewhat superior to MS Office is one of the most ridicolous claims ever heard by mankind!
Google is just filling a small niche market of families and houshold people who need a really minimal write and do-some-calculations program.
The penetration into the real office market is and will always be near zero. Forever! I bet whatever you want against you, mr Arrington!

By: Sri

Sri — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:14:05 +0000

If microsoft finally enters the online apps market, competing against google, it will be the end of google trend (except for search). I hope MS releases better apps, with greater functionality and better integration with MS products like office and windows, that would be a serious blow to google, which releases all its apps with alpha quality and takes many years to mature enough to be usable with basic feature set