Microsoft has to wake up
Microsoft has been the market leader in operating systems and their office suite amongst many other products, however looking back in the past couple of years, Microsoft hasn’t been innovating much. Vista was a total let down, there wasn’t any too revolutionary about this platform except for its enhanced UI. Try the Mac OS X or even the free Linux on the Asus eee PC and you will be understand that Vista is nothing too special. I would like to call Vista the “super pro XP”
With Office 2007 costing ~$500 its pretty expensive for a tool that is slowly becoming free on the market with Zoho, Google Docs and Open Office in the market, the cost of $500 is looking less attractive. I do not foresee that Microsoft losing its market share in this area anytime soon but competitors are giving Microsoft is giving a go for its money.
Google and Salesforce has just partnered together to deliver Google Apps for SalesForce. In a relatively bizarre, but totally logical, partnership, Google apps would be infront of Salesforce’s one million paying business subscribers, and in return, Salesforce would be attracting “tens of millions” of business users on Google Apps. With this partnership, a company can reduce the amount of Mircosoft office suites being purchased and can get access to a word processor free of charge if the company is already subscribed to SalesForce. (Google Apps also has a cut down free version for the general public). See video below.
I reckon that for the continual survival of Microsoft has to innovate and challenge the market. There are great innovators out there like Google, Jive Software and many others. Microsoft needs to learn from some of the top innovators and challenge their products both on features and price. Having said this, they can choose to continue to doing whatever they are doing and still there will be heaps of people out there that would continue to by their stuff due to a strong brand name. They win either ways… Its a question of how much they win by.
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