Microsoft making Office available for free online?
Alright, so the news is that Microsoft is going to bring Office online-- for free. So you'd think that Microsoft, with all of its experience in writing productivity software, would run the table on other online office apps like Google Docs or Zoho, right? I'd agree-- if Office were to be as easy to use and as accessible as these competitors. But read what John Fortt had to say about why he thinks that Office online will be a good thing for Microsoft instead of cannibalizing the existing sales of paid Office software:
Office Web Applications will work better if you actually purchase Office 2010. Users with the latest Office software will be able to more easily share documents and keep each other's changes in sync. Add in the fact that the paid version of Office will come with a brilliant feature that lets Office buyers broadcast their PowerPoint presentations over the web (like Cisco's WebEx), and the Microsoft's online giveaway looks less like an oops, and more like an upsell.
The factors he just listed seem to me to be the exact reasons why Microsoft won't succeed in the online productivity app space. Heck, I've got the latest version of Office on my laptop, but I still prefer to use Google Apps because it doesn't have any tie-ins to desktop software. I don't want my or my colleagues' editing capabilities to be crippled just because some of us don't have the latest version of Office or don't have Office at all.
And as for the certainly brilliant feature that lets paid Office users broadcast their Powerpoint presentations over the web... how long before some competitor (*cough* Google) manages to do the exact same thing, for free?
Microsoft is doing the right thing, here, certainly, of reading the writing on the wall that the days of expensive, installed productivity software are numbered. But I don't feel that they're going to be preventing any loss of market share, here. They're just delaying the inevitable.
