Office Online: Too Little, Too Late
August 09 2008 / by John Heylin / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Business & Work Year: General Rating: 3
Robert Scoble recently sat down with Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President of Information Worker Group at Microsoft, and asked him about some of the new Office features that they are planning for the future.
To sum it up, Microsoft believe that since so many people are buying their product, they are the real powerhouse when it comes to information exchange. They base this on the fact they make billions of dollars and have millions of customers. Did that sound sarcastic? It was. Microsoft is coming late into the game of online collaboration and feels they can make up for lost time by forcing people to buy their product with every new PC that gets released.
This kind of mentality may have worked a year ago, but with Windows Vista sucking wind world-wide people are looking into better alternatives. Mac sales are up, Firefox continues to grow against Explorer, and more and more people are trying out rival operating systems like Linux or Fedora. With Google already releasing over 300 templates for free through their Google Docs program, as well as the growing sentiment against Microsoft products, Microsoft might just fall flat on their face with this one. In other words, why pay ridiculous amounts of money for something that you can already get for free?
