Microsoft desperately needs a damn good new strategy
brambraakman.com
brambraakman.com
As far as I am concerned it would be the Office suite. People at every company want to edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and companies can pay for such software. Companies buy (hundreds of?) millions of MS Office licenses. For me Microsoft = MS Office. Microsoft will remain a huge and profitable company until no one can really compete with MS Office. Most of the things the tech media speaks about is irrelevant in this respect. People will not want to edit documents on smart phones and touch-screens. It is really not sure that people want to edit their documents using an Ajax app and want to host all of their documents remotely at Google.
I would say that other big companies seem to have bad strategies: If they wanted to kill Microsoft they would just have to compete with MS Office directly. The problem what MS Office solves is an essential one. It is incredible that Microsoft has almost monopoly at such an important market.
Editing of documents (albeit simple editing) is something people want on their iPads (and to some extend on other smaller devices too). Do not agree with you there.
Really? Do you think next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop? Or that desktop Mac sales will suddenly jump by orders of magnitude?
> The cost op upgrading is pretty significant, so companies wait longer and longer for that.
I'm not sure it's a cost issue as much as a value for money issue. Companies used to pay a fortune to upgrade to new versions of MS Office, but aside from changing the UI around, to mixed reviews, what major innovation has there really been since the early 2000s to justify the upgrade fees now?
There are plenty of pain points in MS Office where, for example, the usability could be significantly better or some potentially useful functionality is still missing. However, since alternatives such as OpenOffice or Google Docs tend to lag so far behind on these counts anyway, there hasn't been much incentive for MS to improve their product, and the stagnation you alluded to is the result.
> Editing of documents (albeit simple editing) is something people want on their iPads (and to some extend on other smaller devices too).
Sorry, I don't buy it. If I'm in a meeting with a bunch of other guys and we're working through something, it's painful enough watching the guys taking the notes when they are writing them up on a laptop/netbook with a real keyboard, connected up to the projector/TV on the wall. I can only imagine how tedious it would be if they had to fix all the typos and navigate around their document using only a touchscreen.
I would create Google Documents with forms and workflow automation. I'd pay less attention to formatting and emphasize semantics as the exchange of documents would be purely electronic and they would never hit paper. I would also emphasize collaboration and virtual meeting rooms with shared white boards, possibly with added voice chat and, bandwidth allowing, video.
Apple's apps have massive advantages from being produced and sold by the hardware/software/store vendor (can't say I have a lot of sympathy for Microsoft's plight on this particular point!), a narrower feature focus (which is in many ways more desirable on touch platforms), and the mostly-impeccable Apple taste that Microsoft isn't known for.
In my opinion, though, the most difficult hurdle to overcome is that Apple sells the iWork apps for $9.99 a la carte. I can't imagine Microsoft selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint a la carte for even twice that price; they'd be reaping far lower margins than they're used to getting for Office. And I don't think they can do a heavily stripped-down version, either: it'd still take a ton of work and would be even more directly going up against iWork. What's the point?
But if I were the head of the Mac Business Unit, I wouldn't want to tell Ballmer that we have no plans whatsoever and are just going to cede what's been one of our very most profitable markets on what appears to be one of the most important platforms going forward.
And, of course, they're about to run into a somewhat similar issue with the Mac App Store: Mac iWork apps appear to be going a la carte with on-demand instant gratification on what I expect will be the primary channel for users to get Mac apps within a couple of years. Will be interesting to see Microsoft's response on that one, too... Mac Office has been a big cash cow for them.
Take PowerPoint, for example. It would be a step forward to be able to view any presentation file, but only edit certain things (like adding or editing titles and bullets). And have something like a template importer so that new presentations aren't completely plain. This would be worth downloading for a few bucks, and it wouldn't have 99% of the features of the original. Microsoft has to look beyond the, er, list of bullet points enumerating features, and focus on what's actually needed.
MS's corporate customers have iPads, and Blackberry devices, and whatever else. They can and will want access to their documents remotely, via real mobile web apps rather than RDP style kludges that don't work on small displays. And Microsoft does nothing to support these guys?
I've been using Netbeans, which has a bit of the user experience I'm looking for, but seems a little slothlike to me.
I know. It's an excuse for a perceived lower performance, but it's better to progress slowly in the right direction than to rush at warp speed into the vendor lock-in you seem to have escaped ;-)
IIRC, Netbeans was the first editor on the Mac that I found where I could just select and hit tab to indent the selection block without having to change any settings. All the other Mac apps I tried would just replace the text with a tab. Coming off of Windows text editors, it was a huge nuisance to me.
Come on. It's not that bad. Doesn't it default to native look and feel on Macs? I think it does in Windows and it did last time I used it on Linux.
It really doesn't look very Mac-like. It's tolerable, or I wouldn't use it, but that's as kind as I can get in describing it.
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download
Netbeans performance has gotten better in recent versions. Probably worth keeping an eye on the updates.
Let's not forget that Microsoft was the first to build the modern comprehensive online console gaming experience. In addition to being a big revenue stream, monthly subscriptions also have the advantage of being very sticky: there are no sudden movements in this stream of revenue, but gradual trends.
Where MS has stumbled, in my minds and of my colleagues' minds, is the dumbing down of Windows and Office products. In terms of usability, Windows XP and Office 2003 were a good balance of function and learning curve.
I'm of the view that Windows and Office have been around long enough to be quite pervasive, at least in the first world. With such high PC penetration in the marketplace, excessive tweaking to the Office and Windows GUI to make it more palatable to non-computer users was probably unnecessary effort, but I'll also concede that the new chrome probably sold a lot of upgrades.
Microsoft is such a big name that people tend to try out it's product just out of curiosity, with the expectation that something might turn out to be good; given all the money and talent MS has. The company just needs to launch things at a faster pace.