Microsoft's Office 2010: make or break?

15-07-2009

by Ralph Averbuch

Microsoft knows it can't afford to get the next release of Office wrong.

Microsoft's been getting a lot of flak of late, what with the fresh threat to its core business from Google, which is intent on making a simple OS for PCs, or the seemingly endless anti-competition charges from the EU. Such are the trials and tribulations of the market-leader. But with the announcement of Office 2010, one of Microsoft’s core revenue pillars, you have to begin to wonder how the packaged software model is going to fare by the time this next version actually makes it to market? At one time it really was a licence to print money and they did, in bucketloads. That’s why Bill Gates is so inordinately wealthy that he’s now spending most of his time finding ways to give it away. But that established sales model, which has been so good to the company, is under severe threat from the likes of Google Docs and cloud-based utility computing generally. All this does is reduce the importance of the PC to being a thin client; its only job being to give you a window onto the web. So it looks like Microsoft is girding itself to tackle the threat head-on, announcing a range of cut-down web-based versions of Office apps, some of which will appear under the guise of the Azure cloud platform. That’s going to be key, because to fail to protect this core business from cloud-based threats strikes at the very heart of Microsoft’s business: one which was worth USD19 billion in 2008.

Comments

Email a friend

RSS feed

Socialite

Track this story's companies and topics

» Define your own keyword alert

Recent posts
Music sales get more social with Spotify
People make 140 letters priceless
Will Twitter ride the mobile wave?
Hope in the fight against censorship
Smartphones: the tipping point's coming
A malignant threat from our mobiles
Social takes the fight to search
Make room for the message
Apple's new court based tactics
Welcome back King Content