Microsoft gets set for big Office, Vista sell job

Stan Beer
Sunday, 26 November 2006 08:18

Opinion and Analysis

With the release of Office 2007, Microsoft is hoping to reinvigorate growth in an area where corporate users now have an almost ubiquitous intuitive knowledge its office productivity suite. Microsoft's premise is that the Office user interface has become too complicated so that users are unable to take full advantage of the advanced productivity features. Office 2007 is meant to address this shortcoming.

Critics, however, point out that 95% or so of users don't need the advanced features of Office anyway and are comfortable with what they have already with Office 2003. They also point out that moving to Office 2007 will require retraining for little if any productivity gains.

On top of the problems Microsoft faces convincing users that they need to spend money to upgrade to its new version of Office, there are now some viable alternatives in the open source space, such as Open Office.org. It becomes an even tougher sell to convince clients that they must spend money to upgrade to a piece of software, when there's a similar piece of software available for free.

Microsoft may claim that Office 2007 is 10 years more advanced than Open Office.org 2.0 but for many users Office 97 worked just fine.

On top of the threat to Office 2007 from the open source space, Microsoft is facing an increased threat from the software as a service (SaaS) providers. Google, Yahoo and a number of emerging smaller players have all brought products to market that can compete with Microsoft Office in some aspects. Some, such as Zoho, already have full Web 2.0 style online productivity suites. While they're not ready to throw out a serious challenge to Microsoft Office yet, they're not far away.

All of this adds up to possibly the biggest challenge that Microsoft has ever faced to once again reassert its software license fees model in a world where users are increasingly looking for ways to reduce their software costs. On November 30, 2006, Microsoft reaches its first hurdle and over the past five years the bar has been raised very high.