Posted on 05/28/2008 5:27:37 AM PDT by Salo
The Fall of Microsoft Office By Anders Bylund (TMF Zahrim) May 27, 2008
On the same day that the state of New York published a report supporting open formats for electronic documents, mighty Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) said that it would support the open-source ODF format in Office 2007. Redmond's own Open Office XML specification may be heading for the great Recycle Bin in the sky, never to come back.
What happened? The twin developments are noteworthy to astute investors for multiple rasons. While several European countries, the EU itself, and the state of Massachusetts have distanced themselves from proprietary document formats like Word's .doc text documents and Excel's .xls spreadsheets, the same scene looks much more dramatic from the lofty heights of the Empire State.
Across the continent, Mr. Softy rarely throws in the towel until he knows that he's been beaten. Just look at the measures the company is willing to take to stay in the online search fight, despite being thoroughly dominated by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and even Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO). Redmond's hardly fond of wasting its resources, because the company has a pretty good track record in these extra-innings showdowns. But its winning streak only makes its surrender here that much more glaring, especially when the company's backing down on turf it actually created years ago.
Why is this a big deal? Office apps are big business for Microsoft. The Microsoft business division, where Office sales make up the bulk of the operation, provided $18.3 billion out of the company's $58 billion in sales in the past year. The business division also brought in $11.9 billion out of $20.8 billion in operating profit. If the golden Office goose leaves the building, Mr. Softy will be very sad indeed.
That's why Microsoft has been so keen to keep the inner workings of its file formats secret, so that upstarts like Corel (Nasdaq: CREL) WordPerfect or IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Lotus Office would never get the details quite right. It seems that the open-source ODF format, first spawned by Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) and popularized by the free OpenOffice.org office suite, has finally broken the camel's back.
To be sure, various legal challenges to the Microsoft monopoly also helped, and perhaps some other third-party specification would have received this newfound support if ODF wasn't there. The antitrust departments domestically and abroad might have played a large part in forcing Microsoft's hand here. In the end, this can't be good for Microsoft's ego -- or its business.
It's a new world, baby Most of the Office alternatives that support ODF files today have a serious price advantage over Microsoft's products (you can't beat free). And while their support for true-blue Microft-generated files is good, it's not perfect. In that light, you can understand why there must have been a lot of hair-pulling and tooth-gnashing -- maybe even some chair-throwing -- in Redmond before Microsoft made this difficult decision.
When creating business documents in Google Docs, ZoHo, or OpenOffice and sharing them with users of vanilla MS Office becomes both simple and a guaranteed success, there will be much less reason for users to cling to proprietary, locked-in formats. After that, users and IT managers can choose alternative office suites without alienating the regular Office users of the world, and Microsoft will have to protect its cash cow through excellent support, great design, and useful new features, rather than just guarding the well-worn standard upgrade path.
I can't say that Google or Sun or anybody else just won a bigger share of the office software market, and if they did, it won't help their revenue or profits directly anyway. But it's clear as day that Microsoft just took a serious hit, and the impact may take a long time to make itself felt but it will come.
The company's biggest revenue generator may be a shadow of its former self in a few years. I just hope that Microsoft has some alternative business prospects on tap -- and no, tackling Google's search hulk head-on doesn't count.
Thanks, Apple’s resurgence really got rolling when they switched to Intel processors. Parallels and VMware software that allows virtualizing the Windows O/S on Macs are both in the top 20 selling apps for Macs as well.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software/ref=sv_sw_0/002-9669292-9433664
Being that you’re the biggest MS shill on Earth, can you take a moment to explain to me why a retarded 5 year old could produce cleaner HTML than Word’s “Save as HTML”?
Not to someone with such a foul mouth and bad attitude. FYI your lot in life isn’t based on the rich man putting you down.
I apologize for calling you a "shill". Please understand that I've spent an extremely stressful morning thanks to Word, and this is my way of taking out my aggravation in a non-violent way. That said, I'd be genuinely interested in ANY sort of explanation for the utter horrendousness of the HTML I'm forced to scrub on a regular basis.
FYI your lot in life isn’t based on the rich man putting you down.
If you're implying that I'm jealous of Bill Gates, I ain't. My girlfriend is a lot hotter than Melinda, and I have a lot more free time than him. I wouldn't want to switch places.
Maybe as a long term trend. But the Open Office word processor has a LONG way to go before it comes close to matching Word for preparation of complex business documents. If I need more power than Word (and it tends to choke with long documents with lots of graphics), I use Framemaker.
My biggest beef with Open Office is that it has twice destroyed the very careful formatting of Word Documents that I tried to import into and edit in Open Office. I mean destroyed as in start the document over because it cannot be fixed.
So Open Office is still a toy I use on my portable for the bits of word processing I encounter on the road. I guess that is even a little victory of Open Office as that is one license MS did not sell.
Heh...I remember using a Wang word processor before I started using WordStar. At some point I'm sure I used MS Word at work, but at home, I used a copy of Word 97 that I bought on Ebay for a couple of years, before tossing it in favor of OpenOffice a few years ago.
In the past I’ve used the “clean MS HTML” feature in Dreamweaver with fairly good results.
WordPerfect was king of the hill a long time ago, but that was a long time ago. These days WP is in the “is that still around” pile along with most of the surviving hair metal bands.
LOL Microsoft did it's share of 'free loading' software to it's computer sale. Also a trailer on spreadsheets and browsers.
Apparently so. I was sorely disappointed when Word Perfect fell to the MS miasma of Word dominance. WP was/is so technically superior (especially for writing technical documents) that it isn’t funny. I get so pi$$ed when using different portions of the MS suite when coming to find that their cross compatibility sucks in more than I’d care to mention instances. Word is really an inferior product made for the average masses.......
Word is not an HTML editor, and HTML is a constantly evolving markup language. “Save as HTML” is limited, at best.
Assuming that the HTML is intended for a web page, I would suggest embedding an editable area in the web page so that the employee can edit it directly online, bypassing Word altogether. There are many good “editable area” scripts around, for free or very little money, which have interfaces which mimic Word and are therefore familiar to the user (no training necessary).
Personally, I don’t have a problem with clients asking me to convert Word documents into HTML, because they pay me to do so.
Oh, one more thing: if it is absolutely necessary to preserve the formatting of a word document with charts, graphs, etc., I recommend printing it out as a PDF file and linking to it.
Understandable point. I certainly don't expect perfection. However, it should be functional enough to realize that if I'd like an unformatted paragraph, it should output "<p>My Text</p>" rather than "<p class=MsoBodyText align=left style='text-align:left'><span style='mso-bookmark: _Toc137009781'>My Text</span></p>" for EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH!!!!
Assuming that the HTML is intended for a web page, I would suggest embedding an editable area in the web page so that the employee can edit it directly online, bypassing Word altogether.
That would be great, but unfortunately my client base is the corporate travel industry, which is highly comprised of below-average-intelligence, middle-aged women. There is no possibility they will abandon Word. I've been trying to talk them into Google docs for a while now, to no avail.
That's a regular tool in my arsenal as well, but in my experience, it's like treating a gunshot wound with gauze.
Heh...I remember using a Wang word processor before I started using WordStar. At some point I'm sure I used MS Word at work, but at home, I used a copy of Word 97 that I bought on Ebay for a couple of years, before tossing it in favor of OpenOffice a few years ago.
We had one of those Wang word processors before WordStar (on a non-networked shared PC) as well. But it was only at the office secratary's desk. In the beginning, she'd type work for me. Then she turned nazi on all but the Director and made me type my own work on the Wang when she wasn't at her desk.
Then I got my Novell networked 8088 XT PC with a monochrome monitor! WordPerfect 4.something and Pegasus department email.
All was well with the world!! That is until I talked the boss into budgeting for PROFS emulator boards and we all got on the company email!!!!!!!!!
On the sly I talked the IT guy into dropping an extra data line in my office so I could log onto early 1990s vintage AOL with a 2400 baud modem.
Did I mention that cool Ricoh dot matrix printer that we had? ;-)
When I convert Word documents to HTML, I “clean” them of their formatting by copying/pasting them into a plain text program (Notepad) first. Then I usually paste the cleaned text into Dreamweaver.
“a retarded 5 year old could produce cleaner HTML than Word’s “Save as HTML”?”
You’ve got that right. It has an advantage for me. I teach a beginning XHTML class. Students find it very hard to cheat. I can spot the Word code really easily.
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