Before Microsoft office, you bought different software applications from different companies. A word processor here and a spreadsheet there. In that dark age, you even had to pay for e-mail. Today, most people use a single, integrated office suite: Microsoft Office.
Going forward, however, that may become less true than in the past. While I don't doubt that Microsoft Office will continue to dominate in some areas, I think the glory days are past and competitors are picking off Microsoft's office suite applications one at a time. Companies may still buy the whole suite, but increasingly, it's being reduced to it's original core: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Microsoft OneNote is perhaps the most vulnerable part of the office suite. Online applications like Evernote and other collaborative services have done a far better job of moving into the cloud and accepting input from a huge range of devices and solutions. Evernote today is less of a program and more of platform, gathering data from all different sources and then indexing it and syndicating out across multiple devices.
The next victim in the Microsoft Office herd could be Outlook. While many people swear by Outlook, Microsoft has been unable to keep pace with the rate of change in messaging and task management. Services like Remember The Milk do a better job of enabling collaboration, integrate GPS with tasks, and run across a wider range of devices. Indeed, like Evernote, RTM is more web platform than specific application. And e-mail itself on outlook feels weaker than Gmail these days, with it's rich and evolving set of lab functions and third party plug-ins like eTacts.
Will MS Office go away? Probably not. I can't live without Powerpoint. But I use the other applications with ever less frequency as web services increase the emphasis on collaboration and integration over local client functionality.
This trend is furthest along in small businesses and with consumers, and further with Mac Users, who have long had poor office suite choices, than it is in large enterprises and on PCs. But where consumers and Mac users lead, enterprises usually follow (if rather slowly.)
Going forward, however, that may become less true than in the past. While I don't doubt that Microsoft Office will continue to dominate in some areas, I think the glory days are past and competitors are picking off Microsoft's office suite applications one at a time. Companies may still buy the whole suite, but increasingly, it's being reduced to it's original core: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.
Microsoft OneNote is perhaps the most vulnerable part of the office suite. Online applications like Evernote and other collaborative services have done a far better job of moving into the cloud and accepting input from a huge range of devices and solutions. Evernote today is less of a program and more of platform, gathering data from all different sources and then indexing it and syndicating out across multiple devices.
The next victim in the Microsoft Office herd could be Outlook. While many people swear by Outlook, Microsoft has been unable to keep pace with the rate of change in messaging and task management. Services like Remember The Milk do a better job of enabling collaboration, integrate GPS with tasks, and run across a wider range of devices. Indeed, like Evernote, RTM is more web platform than specific application. And e-mail itself on outlook feels weaker than Gmail these days, with it's rich and evolving set of lab functions and third party plug-ins like eTacts.
Will MS Office go away? Probably not. I can't live without Powerpoint. But I use the other applications with ever less frequency as web services increase the emphasis on collaboration and integration over local client functionality.
This trend is furthest along in small businesses and with consumers, and further with Mac Users, who have long had poor office suite choices, than it is in large enterprises and on PCs. But where consumers and Mac users lead, enterprises usually follow (if rather slowly.)
Remember The Milk is one of my favorite new "office suite" applications. Photo from flickr, cc
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