History is littered with names like Novell, Lotus, Borland, Corel, StarOffice and a bunch of others which have tried to stop the Microsoft desktop and LAN juggernaut - its Office, Exchange and Sharepoint families of products.
Larry Dignan’s post on Google Apps had me thinking that in the last year or so I have seen more customers than ever before reopen that conversation.
It’s driven by:
a) Microsoft’s own missteps
Its flip-flop with Vista, the endless torrent of fixes has not endeared Microsoft to many CIOs to start with. But even more aggravating to many has been Microsoft’s wildly inconsistent pricing – when it sells direct, versus what it has in its reseller channel, versus what you can buy retail, or as a student; the differences between upgrade and new purchase pricing; what it packages whether you need them or not (products like OneNote and Access). Compare to the far simpler (and far cheaper) SaaS pricing of vendors I mention below. More and more CIOs are willing to look at a “tiering” decision for Office applications– for power users they may want to continue with MS, but there are plenty of users who will never need to use pivot tables in Excel or watermarks in Word or animations in Powerpoint and who could be migrated to a SaaS offering.
b) Newer and older choices
Far more economical SaaS choices from Zoho with Office type applications, Zimbra around email and Google (more impact in email than Office apps) have made decent inroads particularly in SMBs. Zimbra claims to have over 40 million email boxes. IBM has been tweaking its older Notes and Domino offerings with hosting partners to offer its own version of “SaaS” price competition (and creating its own channel conflicts with its older Notes licensees)
But beyond price, many of these SaaS vendors have opened up the conversation around collaboration. Expect Google with Wave and Cisco (with telepresence, Webex and PosPath) to further define that space.
Finally, we live in the world (ironically while the moniker of Unified Communications is being bandied) where people check their Twitter, FaceBook, Sykpe, SMS on their mobiles before they open their email.
Which of course begs the question Microsoft is increasingly being forced to face – why is our desktop investment not declining with its shrinking role?
