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Ask Slashdot: Who Is Most Likely To Challenge Microsoft In the Office? 147

Posted by BeauHD from the office-space dept.
Tablizer writes: Microsoft still dominates cubicle-land. Google is making a push into that domain, but it's unclear how far or how fast they can go. Most "serious" applications still run on only Windows and that doesn't seem to be changing much. What's keeping others out? Do we need new desktop-oriented, cross-platform standards? It seems everyone "went web" and forgot about the desktop niche, but it's a big niche still.
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Ask Slashdot: Who Is Most Likely To Challenge Microsoft In the Office? More

Ask Slashdot: Who Is Most Likely To Challenge Microsoft In the Office?

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  • My guess is that the various Allen foundations will roll out their first AI-optimized software suites soon, and will then crush the markets and totally replace Microsoft.

    • Maybe AI could do s.t. for a spreadsheet, like optimization or possibly debugging. But what would AI do for a word processor or slide show? All I can imagine is Clippy Yoda: "Writing a letter, are you? Help you, I can!"

      • So basically google mail then?

        • Oh, yeah, I forgot about GMail. I have one email account in Outlook (the desktop version), and one in GMail. The UI for the webmail version of GMail is so bad (admittedly, it's better than the webmail version of Outlook) that on my home computer, I use Thunderbird as a client for GMail. Much better search capabilities, easier to put stuff in folders, easier to visualize a thread (particularly when replying to an email), easier in every way. And best of all, I don't have to use the # key (or the icon) to

  • Fragmentation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @07:36PM (#59526426)

    Developers moved to web based software because a lot of the folks in the office started using Macbooks ( not because they needed them but because they were cool) or linux. Fragmentation meant either you develop 3 different versions or develop one for the web. Those you still made the effort of making a desktop app made it only for the largest installed base - Windows.

    I dont really see a solution.

    • It seems there should be a GUI markup standard with all the common desktop UI idioms built in so bloated and buggy JavaScript libraries are not needed to emulate desktop UI's. Then the UI can run on Windows, Macs, and Linux. The back-end could either be a web server or a client EXE sending GUI markup to the "GUI browser". The local app, if used, would essentially be mirroring a mini or personal web server.

      The GUI markup standard would be kind of like XUL, QML, or XAML, but with more state-oriented options (

      • There are plenty of these (like Oracle Forns) for the web world. (ExtJS, various VB frameworks, etc).

        They all universally suck, as they donâ(TM)t keep up with the capabilities of modern web capabilities (and user expectations) and therefore rot.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          ExtJS appears to be proprietary. I don't know what you mean by "VB frameworks" in terms of GUI markup or standard. Do you have a sample product link?

          They all universally suck, as they don't keep up with the capabilities of modern web capabilities (and user expectations) and therefore rot.

          For "productivity" applications, the expectation is generally a desktop-like experience. Aesthetics aside, GUI's generally peaked or matured in the mid 1990's. For most office work, we don't need new UI inventions. Most s

      • Why? What's the point of all that? Having a variety of OS "skins" doesn't change anything on the kernel side or make applications work across them. Besides, they already exist. https://www.stardock.com/produ... [stardock.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This is what Electron was supposed to solve. A native looking app running in a minimal browser, cross platform.

      And to be fair it isn't bad. I was skeptical but aside from high resource usage apps like VS Code are actually pretty good.

      • True, but once you had electron, the question then became:
        Why bother with a app, if you can just run it as a web page, from the browser, across your entire office via a purhcased DNS domain you use to do business?
        Why bother to roll out compatible hardware when all you need for off site work is Chrome? Or Edge if its a Microsoft product?

        I would argue that on Enterprise level, Electron was a large success. At the least the core technology, because it allowed other apps or applications to do the same.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Well Electron apps have local filesystem access and other native stuff. That's apparently coming to the browser but at the time it wasn't an option.

    • Having some alternate desktop OS options is probably good, but fragmentation is generally not desirable. I don't want to go back to the days when there were a host of incompatible operating systems fighting over each office and home. One dominant standard makes everything work better.

      If the market was split evenly between OSX, Windows and Linux, they would have no interest in interoperability. I'd have three separate AD-like domains to manage instead of just the one, and I don't have time for that.

    • The move to the web happened a little further back.

      During Y2K upgrade a lot of companies were busy getting off their old 20-30 year old mainframes and upgrading to desktops and Client Server based solutions.

      While a lot had moved to a desktop based system with a bunch of personal apps, they had found that Deployments and management of these Apps has gotten very difficult and complex.

      Web 2.0 was getting popular, as with current browsers supporting Javascript, and CSS with AJAX capabilities. Made migrating you

  • Google (Score:5, Informative)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @07:43PM (#59526440)

    I saw my kids use Google Docs for their assignments.

    Then I had to create a spreadsheet to share with some colleagues. Instead of my usual (make it in either MS Excel or LibreOffice Calc (saved in .xls format) and emailed, I decided to try Google Sheets.

    Sheets allowed everyone to look at it and make corrections (once I gave them edit) and kept track of changes much easier than any desktop software I've ever used.

    I'm sure live edits are possible with Excel and Calc. I just never saw it being done so seamlessly as with Sheets. It's probably a killer feature of the Google suite.

    Plus, doesn't hurt that kids are using it in school. :-)

    • In my office we have Office licenses on all our PC's and we can use the exe or web app pretty seamlessly when a group is working on the same document.

      • We have a similar deployment in our office with MS Office, but I have had much less luck with the collaboration features. The web versions of the MS Office apps feel really cobbled together. There are many unexpected behaviors when people collaborate on documents. While G-Suite is not nearly as feature rich--boneheadedly missing some obvious capabilities, things just work much better when collaboratively editing documents.

    • I've used Google's Sheet app for a few things. It's still a very long ways from being an Excel killer. Open/LibreOffice is closer, but still a ways off. For basic spreadsheets it works reasonably well, but for big sheets, or ones that use some of the more specialized functionality found in Excel, I still go back to Excel. As well, to be honest, having used Excel for a couple of decades now, even with the ribbon changes of a decade ago, I just know it so well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Most complex things that Excel is used for would be better done in a database, but the interfaces to them suck so bad that it keeps their usage to specialists.

    • I saw my kids use Google Docs for their assignments.

      Then I had to create a spreadsheet to share with some colleagues. Instead of my usual (make it in either MS Excel or LibreOffice Calc (saved in .xls format) and emailed, I decided to try Google Sheets.

      Sheets allowed everyone to look at it and make corrections (once I gave them edit) and kept track of changes much easier than any desktop software I've ever used.

      I'm sure live edits are possible with Excel and Calc. I just never saw it being done so seamlessly as with Sheets. It's probably a killer feature of the Google suite.

      Plus, doesn't hurt that kids are using it in school. :-)

      Even people who use Excel at work use Sheets at home or elsewhere because it is free and easy to share.

      But that does not mean they want to replace Excel at work, because then they would have to give up their shadow IT pseudo databases.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I just looked, and Chrome and the Google Apps now exceed Apple in the school systems. Good.

      • Re: Google (Score:3, Insightful)

        by BeaverCleaver ( 673164 )

        This scares the shit out of me. Everything a kid does, homeworks, assignments, chatting to their friends, is logged and stored by an advertising company in California. What could possibly go wrong?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          I don't know about the Google cloud, but if this were AWS or Azure as long as the school admins followed the setup template their data would be secure by default. Still, I'd trust Google a lot more than Apple and their attempt to get iPads in all the schools storing their stuff in the iCloud.

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward

            I think the parent post mostly had the fact that an advertising company is profiling your kids right from school-age... they can, (and likely will) use that profiling data to determine employability of your kids once they grow up (they'll have entire record of their education, from grade school all the way through college... they'll know what their strengths and weaknesses are better than the kids themselves).

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by cusco ( 717999 )

              Again, from an AWS perspective they absolutely wouldn't have a clue what the kids' scores were or even what course of study they followed if the schools just followed their basic setup instructions. As far as AWS was concerned there would just be a container with certain permissions that allow student/school/parent access, the company would have no visibility as to what was inside the container.

              Whether Google has set their system up similarly or not I have no idea. If they can access the student's data th

            • Not only can they profile the kids, but they are in a position to affect and steer the education. In practice, they will be able to breed the people they want. Or unbreed the people they don't.

      • This scares the shit out of me. Everything a kid does, homework, assignments, chatting to their friends, is logged and stored by an advertising company in California. What could possibly go wrong?

    • Re:Google (Score:5, Interesting)

      by trawg ( 308495 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:45AM (#59527480) Homepage

      I recently discovered Google Apps Script [google.com], which basically allows you to extend your Google Sheets using JavaScript and some Sheets APIs.

      If you're an Excel power user and already across VBA/Macros, this won't seem like a big deal. But I never got into VBA; every time I tried it I struggled with basic tasks and gave up quickly - was just easier to break out of Excel and write code in a language I knew to process the data.

      But being (basically) JavaScript, I found Apps Script really easy to pick up, and I say this as someone that a) is not a JavaScript expert b) can't stand JavaScript.

      I prototyped a full, working implementation of a basic application for a client that showed how to integrate our API in a couple of hours. Supporting REST API calls makes it a breeze; a couple of lines of code and you can hack together simple interfaces for people to use and extend.

      It's a bit slow and clunky in parts, but it works. I have been very impressed. Again, if you're an Excel pro this offers nothing new. (While doing this I also discovered that Excel now lets you create custom functions etc using JavaScript too [microsoft.com]!).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Retron ( 577778 )

      " It's probably a killer feature of the Google suite."

      Working in a school, the "killer feature" (using the term differently) is that Google Docs uses so many resources on our older PCs it makes it almost unusable - whereas regular old Office works just fine on our 10-year-old Core2 Duos with 2 to 4GB of RAM.

      (The reason is that emulating a word processor in a Web browser like Chrome takes an order of magnitude more resources than just running a native EXE. It kind of makes me wonder how Chromebooks do it, co

      • It kind of makes me wonder how Chromebooks do it

        JIT compilation optimizations and reuse after compile. Chrome is written to optimize on newer machines with the ISA that comes with the new machines. Older machines that lack those specific instructions that Chrome aims for bypass using any alternative. It's amazing how much power you can get out of a "crummy" machine when the software is optimized for said hardware.

    • Re:Google (Score:5, Interesting)

      by idji ( 984038 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @03:17AM (#59527618)
      Now try to do something with 100,000 rows in Google sheets, and you will see why Excel rules to business world.
      Most business people are not collaborating in excel, they are doing their work and passing it to the next person - yes, it's inefficient, but the people won't change. {I know - i build software robots to automate Excel processes and people are the biggest hindrance to their own productivity}

      • Re:Google (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MeNeXT ( 200840 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @08:39AM (#59527996)

        You just described my biggest nightmare with Excel. 100000 rows in an approved budget when entered into the accounting system create a result that is very different than what Excel represented.

        Most large Excel documents I had to deal with had errors that made them a waste of time. The energy to create and tie down an Excel document is just not worth the effort.

        Yes business use it but it doesn't mean they should. It's a nice tool for quick calculations but terrible for large documents especially 100000 rows. It's easier to learn and write your own program.

  • There's nobody right now. We need a decent point-of-sale and accounting package, and there's nothing available on *nix, and Mac OS just has a very, very few.

    • Re:Nobody (Score:5, Informative)

      by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @08:41PM (#59526628)

      >"There's nobody right now. We need a decent point-of-sale and accounting package, and there's nothing available on *nix,"

      That is not true. We have been using Quasar for many years now on Linux for our large gift shop:

      http://linuxcanada.com/ [linuxcanada.com]

      It is full-featured, reliable, reasonably priced, and works well. We use barcoding, automatic cash drawer, receipt printer, POS customer display, etc. And it is on the network so we have full accounting and inventory control access anywhere in the building. Only thing we don't have is a connection to the band card terminal (not sure that is possible, we just use it in stand-alone mode).

      (And no, we are not in Canada)

    • There are several for iOS and Android which are both *NIX variants.

  • Google's advantage is ease in sharing and live collaborating with others. Lots of shared spreadsheets that are just amazing to use and contribute to.

    Google's disadvantage is that they're Google. They work on Steam logic where they do something rather neat... then promptly forget about it right when they've built up to something that can reach critical mass. Like they're afraid of taking too much time with something too good.

    Ryan Fenton

  • Currently...no one (Score:5, Insightful)

    by omibus ( 116064 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @07:45PM (#59526446) Homepage Journal

    From a business standpoint, they trust Office. End of story. Microsoft has to fail for that to end. When I write reports for business analyst, the most consistent way to get them angry is to not include export to Excel. "oh, you wrote the report I asked you for, where is the export to excel? Screw you then, put that in and I will talk to you." Those people live in Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook. And there is no force on the face of the Earth that will compel them elsewhere.

    Data Scientists might like R or Python with Machine learning...business worker don't need any of that crap, Excel does everything their imaginations would ever want.

    Second point: if something goes wrong, what a business manager wants is a throat to choke. Who to I call up and swear to when something goes really wrong. They want to know that someone is getting fired over their outage. Microsoft gives them that (not the firing part, but they know how to play along). Better if it is a big company that they know has dealt with "big" problems like theirs before. Open Source? You mean some guy in his mom's basement? Sure, we can go after his lunch money, but that is not nearly exciting enough.

    TL:DR: Unless Microsoft screws themselves and does something really wrong, no one else really has a chance.

    • Our company was using Google apps. Worked extremely well. Google hangouts, shared slides everything was really nice. No one I know complained.

      Then suddenly they are switching to office 365 and it is really painful. The decision defies logic. If it is India I would have said corruption and bribes. Here, I am not sure what is really going on..

    • I call BS

      For that last 7 years I've worked at companies from 30-50K employees. All using Google Docs.

      Also machine learning people use jupyter, if you think excel can do what machine learning / data scientists need, you don't know what you are talking about.

      • And next you'll explain how Mathematica has rendered Excel obsolete and unnecessary for big math jobs.

        Yeah, and we got lasers, so why do we bother with steak knives?

    • This practice is slowly changing, also in dinosaur coorporations.

      Sending a link to a shared (optionally editable or commentable) sheet works very well for more and more clients.

      And as the majority soon prefer to work on online documents, the tectonic plates of the office applications will shift.

      Have you tried Office 365? It's slow, unreliable, full of failures requiring reloads, logout of edits, lacks important features, often requires you install the native application side by side (just wtf), and has a te

    • >

      Second point: if something goes wrong, what a business manager wants is a throat to choke. Who to I call up and swear to when something goes really wrong. They want to know that someone is getting fired over their outage. Microsoft gives them that (not the firing part, but they know how to play along). Better if it is a big company that they know has dealt with "big" problems like theirs before. Open Source? You mean some guy in his mom's basement? Sure, we can go after his lunch money, but that is not nearly exciting enough.

      Which is nonsense. Microsoft is liable for basically nothing, nobody gets fired, and you aren't going to succeed in suing them because your Word doc got corrupted.

      (Yes, it's nonsense that works so far as marketing, but that doesn't make it any less nonsense.)

  • Other than office all our apps from ERP to timesheet are web based. As far as developers go .. most develop in a linux VM on Windows.. When we move to the cloud this year.. they will be developing on Linux VM's in the cloud. I don't know about others in cubicle land .. but for us dev's everything I need is running on Linux ( or mac .. but I work for the government .. so they are not buying us Macs!!) I still have to run Ms Office.. however eventually that will be replaced by something else.

    • Ha. Where I work (60k+ employees worldwide) we also have mostly web apps, though I fight for terminal apps that are just more useful. And my own terminal emulator, HOD is pus.

      Our devs mostly work on Macbooks and in the inevitable JS environments. They drive the desktop support guys crazy because they never shut down their machines, never want to update, and never save anything until the last second.

      Oh, and we deny them Git for security reasons. And a bunch of other insanely useful online tools, but security

  • Will apple make an there own play?

  • Are there any actual real stats or is the author just assuming everyone uses Office?

    e.g.
    Google sheets is extremely popular due to sharing being dead easy. Does anyone know how that has effected Excel usage?

  • While I'm not keen on replacing one big monopolistic company with another, the only real alternative I currently see in the market is G Suite, mostly in smaller/medium sized shops. The big players will be locked into Office for the foreseeable future. But many smaller companies I have seen switching to G Suite almost entirely. It's not always easy to deal with them though. Send them a Word document to update and what you get back is one malformed mess. Same for spreadsheets. Google is keen to sell you anoth

  • I kept pushing everyone to Corel office and Groupwise, but NO you douchebags had to go with MS Office and Outlook, now look where we're at. Outlook has been the next-biggest vector for spreading viruses ever, next to Internet Explorer, Corel has become an also-ran, and Steve Balmer became so bloated with stock he made a fortune kicking his own ass out the door. [dailymail.co.uk]

    • Yup. Even the GW server bugs were tolerable compared to Exchange. GW client was a dream. You could run a LAMP stack on a NetWare 5 server with uptime comparable to Linux, and get support you could call and talk to.

      Ah, those were halcyon days, yes?

      • I really do miss Novell.

        By today's standards the Netware 4 servers that I put most of my early career into are little more than super-glorified NAS systems (with printer sharing), but they worked oh, so well. I did a little with Netware 5 as well, more of the same plus so much more. Working with Novell and Netscape like I did when Microsoft was on the attack warpath really did put me in the front row to witness what was going on, and just how under-handed it was.

        For those who don't know Microsoft would ma

  • The desktop is dead. Microsoft is killing it. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Correct Horse ( 6463960 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @07:59PM (#59526504)
    The desktop is high-maintenance for the admins and low return for the software companies, compared to software-as-a-service. Nobody is going to challenge Microsoft on the desktop. The users are going to leave Microsoft for the cloud where the competitors are already waiting. With the end of Windows 7 next month, many will reevaluate their choice of platform. What advantage does the desktop still have, now that Microsoft has decided that they own your computer?

  • Office and power user apps (Score:3)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @08:12PM (#59526530) Homepage

    There are two major areas that are protecting Microsoft's position: office and power user apps.

    The main office app that matters is Outlook. Most companies are all-in on Outlook, not only for email but (crucially) for appointment scheduling.

    It's very difficult to make something that competes with Outlook and has all the same features. It's nearly impossible to make a good competitor and make it inter-operate with Outlook for a smooth phased roll-out. I think a few companies have tried over the years and nobody has succeeded.

    To a lesser extent the other Microsoft Office apps also are part of the firewall. The key difference is that LibreOffice is a viable competitor that actually interoperates well (LibreOffice can open Microsoft Office apps) so arguably the Office apps firewall is weak.

    Power user apps also matter. Some people rely heavily on PhotoShop, or video editing software, or professional audio production software; and the open-source equivalents are not viable replacements.

    Adobe as a company seems scared of Linux. At one point Adobe actually made a version of FrameMaker for Linux but they changed their minds quickly and stopped supporting Linux. I'm not expecting Adobe or any of the other big software companies to suddenly get excited about offering their software on Linux.

    At this point there are layers and layers in the situation, all helping preserve the status quo. There's a pervasive culture of "nobody ever got fired for standardizing on Windows". PC manufacturers all default to shipping Windows on their hardware. And with Windows 10, the Windows experience isn't as bad as it was a few years ago.

    So you have an OS that meets the "Good Enough" standard, combined with must-have apps (Outlook, PhotoShop, etc.) and there's just no energy around investigating alternatives.

    Note: It is possible to run a company without Microsoft Office software. The company for which I work has standardized on Google apps: we use GMail for our email and appointment scheduling, we use Google Docs (including Google Sheets spreadsheets) for sharing information and getting collaborative inputs, and the technical employees include a nonzero number of Linux users (including me) who don't have any problems inter-operating with the non-Linux users. The key is that our company never ran Microsoft in the first place. It started out on Google and never left it.

    It's possible for a company that is all-in on Windows to change to Linux. The costs will all be immediate and obvious and the benefits are mostly long-term and non-obvious. That's why it doesn't happen more often.

    P.S. From a technical perspective, it's easier to sell software for Windows than for Linux. Linux has a more complicated set of library dependencies.

    I have some hopes that a container-based application standard will emerge. Library dependencies are simple if your app simply includes a known good copy of every library it needs, and it only uses its own copies of everything. This is wasteful of disk space, but disk space is cheap and we don't need to conserve it.

    Maybe someday the power user apps will be available as "snaps" on Linux. But I'm not expecting it to happen soon.

    • Re:Office and power user apps (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian.bixby@gmail . c om> on Monday December 16, 2019 @09:53PM (#59526830)

      China is leading the charge away from the Windows desktop. Their Kylin Linux variant has a Windows-clone interface that apparently makes it easier for end users to migrate, and either that or their Red Flag Linux is installed on all government desktops throughout the country. That's an enormous installed user base, and if India follows suit that would be critical mass.

      I'm not sure what Kylin uses for a communications suite, but if it does messaging, emails and calendars adequately (none of which is rocket science) and cheaply enough then Outlook, Skype and Exchange can be replaced.

      A lot of folks point at Excel as the roadblock but let's face it, more than 90% of Excel users will utilize less than 10% of its features. There is a place for Excel (mostly among folks who are unable to learn SQL to do the job correctly), but it can sit on a VM somewhere.

      Interoperability is currently a headache, but China could force the issue in much of the world. Already if a document goes to partners in Africa or Latin America the recipient is expected to deal with it. Since "dealing with it" generally means using some piece of freeware like Libre Office they're getting introduced to MS Office alternatives.

      The US will be the last holdout, like we are for the Imperial measuring system, but as the US gets increasingly irrelevant to much of the world that will become less of an issue.

  • everyone is OK with running all their Business and Personal information through the big tech firms so they can have information to mine and sell.

    Everything in the cloud is being read and processed by big tech employees and any 3rd parties with the cash.

    But then, OH well, the cows are out of the barn already so closing the door does little. The masses and all their data are already lost.

    Just my 2 cents ;)

    • Re:I just can't believe that (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sgage ( 109086 ) on Monday December 16, 2019 @08:21PM (#59526554)

      I agree - the personal comuter revolution is over. We're back to terminals on a mainframe, in effect, except the computer(s) involved don't belong to your company - they belong to a company that makes its money on mining your data, and selling it.

      Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

      • And so the wheel turns... Give it 10 more years, we'll "discover" that you can put power out at the terminal, and then just do everything locally instead of on a remote server - err, the cloud.
        • So true, I have actually thought the real solution is to make these devices in to modern terminals/input/access devices.
          I agree with big corp in one thing, thin client maybe the way.
          What I wonder is, if those with the resources and privacy/security concerns may go to a HomeCore so to speak with that being under your control or at least more private if it is locally co located.
          The point being it's purpose is what you make it not others.

          Just my 2 Cents ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      If your company is using the cloud and AWS or Azure (don't know about the minor players) have access to your data then you're doing something incredibly, remarkably, stupidly wrong. Follow the bloody templates during setup and it's secure from the host, they can't even access your backups to restore elsewhere like Iron Mountain could with your backup tapes.

      Everything in the cloud is being read and processed by big tech employees and any 3rd parties with the cash.

      Does that fancy tinfoil hat protect you from the aliens manipulating your brain waves too?

  • In just about all mid to large companies that already use Office, there is a huge base of small Excel and Access applications that individual offices live and die by.

    Built by "the smart guy" who left 4 years ago, but that office does some function that absolutely relies on that Excel/Access/Word thing with its macros and interconnectivity. And it currently "just works". Moving to some other platform would require rebuilding that thing. Libre and Google are close, but NOT 100%.

    Libre and google may be marg

    • The transition from MS Office to another suite will happen at first for small companies that cannot cost justify the cost premium for Microsoft. Keep in mind that Microsoft prices their products factoring in switching costs. Switching costs keep legacy customer from switching, but new start-ups have no switching costs so the prices just seem like a premium. The full transition will take place once these start-ups grow, start competing directly with established firms and create a cost/killer feature advan

  • "Most "serious" applications still run on only Windows and that doesn't seem to be changing much. What's keeping others out?" At first I misread your post as asking what was keeping users out of web-based apps, and I had an easy answer for that: power. I had to write a report recently with a distributed group of users, and was appalled at how hard it was to do many unsophisticated things on google's doc writer.

    But I think your question is rather what's keeping application providers off the web, and I don'

  • Seriously, you need a real good business case for us to give you a Windows license. We do however have office licenses for Mac.

  • MS sells their E3 license, which comes with everything most business users would ever want. And a bunch of stuff they probably don't, want, too, but it's SO CHEAP. You get the Office apps, an Exchange mailbox (with archiving), OneDrive/Sharepoint online storage (like, a terabytes or something ridiculous like that)...all kinds of stuff. It's hard to beat.

    And then, for really small offices (or more daring big offices), you can just run all of your servers in Azure. You can even use nothing but AzureAD if you

  • Group policy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:28AM (#59527442) Homepage

    Until somebody else comes out with a desktop that enables security teams to enforce "group policies" across their entire network, nobody else will have a chance.

    In order to get a toehold in business, Google for Business had to integrate with Active Directory.

    It's not Word and Excel that keep Microsoft dominant. It's Active Directory and Group Policies, that only an IT department could love!

    • Until somebody else comes out with a desktop that enables security teams to enforce "group policies" across their entire network, nobody else will have a chance.

      In order to get a toehold in business, Google for Business had to integrate with Active Directory.

      It's not Word and Excel that keep Microsoft dominant. It's Active Directory and Group Policies, that only an IT department could love!

      I agree with you on AD, but not on Excel. Over the years, I think there are three essential Office application where MS dominates - Excel, Powerpoint, and Visio. There are alternatives, but none are as good as them at what they do. For basics, yes there are others. But Excel is a powerhouse. Powerpoint is easy to use and as long as people follow good presentation principles, nothing comes close to it for me. Visio has faltered in the last few versions but that is more due to MS (ripping out functional

  • WPS is pretty nice. It seems to be one of the best solutions out there except for the lack of an integrated grammar checker. This of course should be able to be solved using a Grammarly plugin or something similar. I expect the WPS guys will get some pretty serious government investment from China to make it a more mainstream product.

  • non techies (Score:3)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @03:47AM (#59527650) Homepage Journal

    For everyone who is not a techie, Microsoft Office is office software. There's only office. Nothing else even exists in their minds. Managers especially essentially live inside of Excel and Powerpoint.

    Word is the easiest to replace as 99% of people use maybe 2% of its functionality and any slightly advanced RTF editor (you need headers, footers and TOC) could replace it. But take Excel and Powerpoint away from a manager and you could've just as well chopped off both his hands.

    Nothing visible on the market or in the distance has even the smallest chance of changing that.

    • I often see non-management people using lowercase "excel" in the same way they use "googling" to mean web search. I'm pretty sure many of these people are using tablets/smartphones without MS Office, but the name has stuck to mean any spreadsheet application, or even any vaguely organized method of accounting numbers.

      For example, this article on the division of household work between men and women [www.hs.fi] (Finnish, subscribers only). The quote in the headline means "Excel has made me happier than being proposed

  • For anyone unable to understand computers and in dire need of someone/something watching over them and their files 24/7 Google is a godsend. ChromeOS boots in 10 seconds, has *everything* your regular office worker needs, is operatable by a simpleton, runs on super-cheap hardware and costs "nothing", aside from, you know, Google watching over you.

    MS only still has a foothold in the office becaue people are used to Windows and its backwardness.

  • Wine 5.0 is due in a month, and several important office-related bugs have been fixed. Of the bugs I fixed, it contains aggregation support for the web browser COM object and msxml3 support for URL-encoded filenames (used by several Microsoft products), string length fixes when editing treeview control labels, fix for a buffer overflow in long treeview labels, support for overwriting pixels instead of alpha blending in gdiplus to fix the graphical corruption due to transparent brushes not erasing the backgr

  • Challenge? What challenge? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @07:28AM (#59527900)

    LibreOffice and Thunderbird on Linux already are a better choice, if only for price and reliability.

    It is not like basic offices need such advanced tech that wasn't already done and good enough, decades ago.

    Any solution will do.

    The reason MS is used is not because of any rational reasons, but purely an old bad habit.

    I always find it funny, when LO is better at opening old MS Office files than MS Office itsel.

  • Who Is Most Likely To Challenge Microsoft In the Office?

    Google Docs. Its document, spreadsheet and presentation services are widely used in the office and home. But so is Office 365.

    Office is pretty much a standard, and with a relatively cheap subscription rate not unlike, say, a streaming service, there's not much of a reason for a competitor to come along on price alone.

    Then there's the fact many school districts in the US provide an Office subscription for free for each household or student (depending of location). That's how my kids do their work. I don'

  • Most businesses are moving to Office365 because of the extra benefits it gives.
    Office is no longer just Word/Excel/PowerPoint. There are lots of other applications being included which are not available (and will not be available) in the locally installed version(s).
    The only company with muscles to challenge Microsoft is Google. And they really do not care about the offline market.

    The offline market will pretty much disappear in a few years for businesses, and for the rest, there is openoffice or simil

  • Libre, of course (Score:3)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @08:34AM (#59527992) Journal

    Logically, LIbreOffice is of course the challenger. It's as compatible as anything is going to be, does everything that 99% of people need, and you can keep an old Windows box in the corner for the other 1% if you need to.

    But logic has nothing to do with it, sadly.

  • indeed, including MS itself, pushing Office365 like crazy.
    If anything, 365 is the biggest competitor to 'desktop' Office.

  • We are lucky enough to have a programmer who has built our ERP system, so we don't need those killer Excel features, nor its performance. No one is doing calculations with 100,000 rows in a spreadsheet because we program everything.

    Our business analyst use PHPMyAdmin and makes his own queries when needed.

    If you can't escape Excel because you are using it as your ERP, considering getting 1-2 programmers. No, not just for the sake of leaving Excel, but because odds are that half your staff are essentially

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