Desktop Productivity Suites are NOT Sweet
My blog post last week about Netbooks and the future of Web Apps got me thinking about office ‘productivity’ suites. As we witness a computing revolution brought on by the Internet and cloud computing, can user adoption of Netbooks, Google Chrome OS and Web Apps beat out the more established rivals found in PCs, Windows OS and Microsoft Office? Many other questions come to mind in the contest of ‘Battle Cloud versus Desktop’ – who will reign supreme?
Why do people need or want office productivity suites? By suites, I mean groups of applications which, while addressing very different use cases, are bundled together in one purchasing decision for some strange reason. Buying a suite of productivity applications like this really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Customers want choice. They want to choose what is best for their specific needs and encourage vendors to compete to make the best products. Think about it, we do not buy our music or computer games in suites or watch television from only one network. Rather, we purchase the various music and games we like, watch television that interests us and see movies that we like. So why should desktop productivity suites be an exception, forcing users to purchase an entire package of programs that they may or may not use or even like? Instead, let the best application win. Let innovation win. Let costumer choice win.
You can probably guess that I stand firmly in support of ‘Team Cloud’. Why invest in bundled productivity suites such as Microsoft Office when the Internet offers customizable programs and applications aimed to work best for you and your business. Maybe you like Gmail for your email, SlideRocket for your presentations and Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets. Great! The truth is, how many of the features in Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel do you really use. And for most users the Microsoft suite is a group of silo’d programs with little to no interaction. It can’t be worth the cost when the alternatives online are turning out a phenomenal competition with revolutionary features.
A major factor in the battle is user adoption. While we see teams of people switching to ‘Team Cloud’, the battle has just begun. Here at SlideRocket we are working hard to get people to forget about firing up their static MSFT Office Suite and desktop presentation application. Instead, reach for the clouds and discover a whole new realm of functionality and the value of online presentations.
Companies like Google are making great strides, turning people on to web-based applications and productivity suites. As 2009 comes to an end and we move into 2010, I will be incredibly interested to see how the battle unfolds. Will products such as Chrome OS and Netbooks accelerate the pace of users turning away from their desktop OS and software products? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this interesting debate.
Ben
December 7, 2009 @ 11:34 am
If it’s a simple “apples with apples” comparison,the web app vendors have a hard time. If the only difference is web accessibility then the trad vendors will catch up soon.
There’s an entire area of value add that apps like sliderocket can bring – harnessing the application, tying it to traceable calls to actions, analytics, contextual content and the like. Web app vendors need to start talking about this stuff and really show customers where the value lies….
Chuck
December 7, 2009 @ 2:49 pm
Couldn’t agree more Ben. Part of our goal at SlideRocket is educating people that moving traditional software apps to the web introduces an entire new set of use cases and features that result in significant business value. Many times this value was never contemplated in the old software world because it simply wasn’t possible. For example, slides that update automatically, track visitor viewing patterns, feed dynamic web content are possible with SlideRocket. Having living, breathing presentations is only possible when your content/slides are built on the web, for the web.
Andy
December 7, 2009 @ 4:31 pm
As you probably already know, Office Web Apps are currently in Beta. I was wondering if you’ve tried them yet and what you think?
Cheers,
Andy
MSFT Office Live Outreach Team
Bob
December 8, 2009 @ 1:26 am
You know, once upon a time, about… say, 20 years ago, the “best of breed” argument was all the rage — from certain companies.
I think there was a company called WordPerfect that had the best word processor. And another one called Lotus that had a spreadsheet called “1-2-3″ (as in: as easy as… get it?
.
Microsoft built a suite of applications that worked together. You could copy and paste between them. When you learned how to use a feature in one of them, it was in the same in the other. Maybe one app was not as good as the best in the category, but the sum of all the apps was a superior combination.
In short, the market spoke. People wanted apps that worked together more than they wanted whatever extra feature WordPerfect or 1-2-3 had.
Now, 20 years later, you want to argue that being the Freelance Graphics of the web world is the best strategy?
Yeah. Good luck with that.
Gretchen Pirolli
October 3, 2010 @ 8:09 pm
Hi, I’m having issues loading your post. Only somewhere around half of this page appears to load, and the remaining is just empty. I’m not really certain why…. but you may like to look it over. I’ll check back again later, this could be on my side.