Tagged with microsoft …

Jun 02 2011
Technology

The next Windows, 8 – radical change at last?

At last, an end to the tired old Windows interface, itself a poor derivation of the original Apple Mac and Xerox windowed interfaces. Yes, Windows 7 is quite slick and has some useful innovations, but it’s stuck in a 1980s paradigm.

Microsoft’s preview (video below) of the next version of Windows (for release perhaps in early 2012?) is a radical leap from Windows 7. It’s designed for touchscreen as well as conventional mouse/keyboard setups, and draws on the different ways we’re learning to use touchscreen devices such as iPads and smartphones.

Applications appear in tiles that you manipulate and navigate with fingers (on a touchscreen) or mouse (on a desktop). The file browser is replaced by an interface that bridges and combines different stores and sources of data. And you can still run traditional applications such as MS Office.

It’s just a preview so there’s no sense in a critique – but it’s promising. As Apple’s mouse OS X and touchscreen iOS converge into a single OS, can MS leapfrog them with a fresh start? Competition, when it gets through to Microsoft, can be a wonderful thing.

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Jun 08 2010
Technology

Word’s web app – pretty deficient

 

Microsoft went live with Windows Live Skydrive, the competitor to Google Docs which lets you edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations. Too little, too late – a familiar comment on MS’s efforts these days. Here’s a quick look at the Word web app.

The promise is that we’ll be able to seamlessly move between viewing and editing docs with the high-powered and well-known MS Word and with a lower-powered browser version. The web app is pretty, and has a usefully familiar interface, but it is a long way behind Google.

Some of the shortcomings will be fixed, but some are non-trivial and others are showstoppers for many businesses:

  • most users are now back to 1995 in terms of losing unsaved work: docs don’t autosave, we know how bad people are at saving and, whilst Word 2003+ is pretty stable, browsers aren’t…
  • if you share an unsaved doc you lose unsaved work without even a warning
  • there’s no collaborative editing
  • it doesn’t let you edit the paragraph styles
  • the version history is very clunky
  • there are no comments, table of contents, footnotes, headers, footers, margins
  • if you upload a word file and edit online, you create a second (editable) online copy alongside the first (uneditable) online copy: confusing… really good for version out-of-control snafus
  • it doesn’t work well on all browsers

Amusingly, somewhere in the version history, my Google Docs account grabbed control and threw an error saying it couldn’t show the doc. Play nice, boys!

 

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Apr 26 2010
Technology

Microsoft’s huge online bet

If you thought the days of online services losing buckets of investors’ money went out in the original dotcom boom, look at the Business Insider Chart of the Day for Microsoft’s Online Services Division. $711m lost in the first quarter of 2010, $10bn lost since 1998.

You can see this as partly the flipside of their huge profits on Office – some of these online services are the next, web-based, iteration of Office – but is Google really losing this much on developing Google Apps?

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Nov 13 2009
Technology

Microsoft Office vs Google Apps – differing strategies

A useful summary from Tim Anderson of the differing strategies of Microsoft and Google in the email/document space. If I knew the winner, I’d place my bet in the stock market… but the collaborative power of Google Apps and the functional maturity of MS Office mean that both are compelling and neither is likely to beat out the other for some years.

Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.

Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.

Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.

Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.

Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.

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Oct 20 2009
Technology

Fake Steve skewers the Borg

Fake Steve does a sharp analysis of Microsoft’s fading “copycat business model”

How did Microsoft find itself a leader in nothing and playing catch-up on every front?… They put so much effort into lost causes like search… they keep missing out on new things… Larry’s like, Look, the Borg has never been out ahead on anything. The difference is, they used to be able to catch up. They’ve always been copiers. That’s been their business model from the start. Let others go out and create a market, then copy what they’ve done, sell it for less, and crush them…

What happened?… the Borg got slower. They got big and fat and bureaucratic… everyone else got faster. Another difference was the customer set… on the Web things changed — now you were selling to consumers, and the Borg had no way to coerce or control consumers the way they could coerce corporate accounts.

So what happens next?… Do not be surprised if they find a way to get into services, and build a business around milking their installed base. They’ll call it a cloud business, but really it will mean either building data centers and renting out cycles, or just running customer data centers for them.

Do read the whole piece – it’s full of waspishly acute observations.

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Sep 22 2009
Technology

MS Office on the web slips further away

We were promised a preview of Microsoft’s web-based Office applications this summer – and now they offer only a dud preview to selected pundits. Meanwhile Google’s web apps have infiltrated up to 20% of companies and can enjoy at least another year’s viral growth before the MS products launch.

The MS preview sounds too early-stage to bother picking holes in – many features are missing or broken – but MS appear to want us to use the web apps as ‘lite’ versions, reverting to the desktop apps for serious work. Apart from large spreadsheets, which I can’t see running fast enough in a web browser, this misses the point: the joy of web apps is being able to entirely drop the desktop apps – being able to work from any computer you find to hand, not having to worry about upgrades and versions, not having to remember to upload and backup your docs.

Google apps users are learning to do more with less – and doing fine. Only corporate inertia will save Microsoft from itself now.

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Sep 01 2009
Technology

British small businesses head for the clouds

Surprisingly strong support for web applications in general and especially Google Apps from a survey of UK small businesses.

  • 71% aware of Google Apps
  • 13% intend and 22% are considering switching to Google Apps – as many as have decided not to switch
  • 62% prefer to have business apps work through a browser
  • 32% use firefox as default browser
  • 8% intend to upgrade to W7

The survey covered 1400 Microsoft customers, so we have to assume it’s a representative sample of our small businesses. If so, these are astonishing numbers. Google Apps is immature and buggy (though sometimes impressive) and is far from a direct replacement for MS Office, but it’s clearly made itself widely known and seduced many (including Conosco – we use, resell and offer our IT support services for it).

The number preferring web apps suggests that the browser-based computing team has won already, and the high use of Firefox suggests a maturity in their users (MS’s Internet Explorer was awful for web apps until the very recent release of IE8).

These would be bad enough for MS – which is still pushing desktop apps, with browser apps for occasional light use – but the W7 uptake is dreadful. Ironically, upgrading to W7 is clearly the right course – it’s far better than its predecessors Vista and XP.

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Aug 14 2009
Technology

Microsoft scrambles for last grip on Mac users

Microsoft has announced a new version of Outlook for the Mac – for late 2010. This is good news for many Mac users, irrelevant for many others and might indicate some desperation at Redmond.

It’s good news because Mac users have never had a good way to connect to MS Exchange, the dominant mail/calendar server for businesses. MS dropped Mac.Outlook after 1998, offering OS X users the Entourage program – which was and still is a dog: it lacks many Outlook features and is horrible to use. The new Outlook promises to have the same features as Windows.Outlook whilst being a true Mac application – e.g. storing data in files rather than a huge database (source of most Outlook problems).

Why did MS hobble Outlook/Entourage for the Mac? Presumably because Exchange has been essential for most businesses, so this would keep business users on Windows and perpetuate sales of MS Office. Indeed, Outlook is theirreplaceable part of Office – powerful, effective and unrivalled. Up to now, this has worked – at Conosco we’ve discouraged our customers from Macs for good practical reasons.

So why this change of heart and why announce it now, more than a year before it’s due? FUD – the old MS trick of spiking the opposition. Within a month Apple releases the Snow Leopard upgrade to OS X, which makes the Mac’s native mail and calendar apps work properly with Exchange. And many are now moving to web-based services such as Google Apps and Zoho anyway.

Too little too late. MS has probably lost the Apple community now – if you can drop Entourage/Outlook, you can drop MS Office (there are already good alternatives to Word/Excel/Powerpoint). Macs are eating into the PC market – in the last few months we’ve suddenly started selling a lot of Macs at Conosco. The best hope for MS is that their new software+service version of Office can outflank the competition – but it’s not even in beta yet.

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Jul 14 2009
Technology

Microsoft attacks Google with free Office apps

Microsoft has announced details of Office 2010. Techcrunch has a complete guide – highlights include

  • Free web versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel, with stripped-down functionality (but more than Google’s apps)
  • Three screens strategy allows the apps to synchronise across phone, browser and desktop
  • Word allows multiple users to work on a document at the same time (not available with the web version)
  • Thread view for email messages in Outlook (about time)

We’ll hold judgement until we’ve actually tried the apps, but it looks good enough to defend some of Fortress Office, though Google has clearly undermined some of the walls and may still have the edge in some areas

  • Real-time document collaboration is a huge advancement. In Google’s spreadsheet app, this feature alone outweighs many of MS Office’s fancy functions in usefulness. MS appears to be lagging.
  • Most people use only a tiny fraction of MS Office’s features, so the free web versions may be sufficient for a large chunk of the userbase – hitting MS’s revenues hard.
  • MS’s software + services (i.e. desktop and web-based) is a potential winner for heavier users of Office – you can do the complex work on a desktop, and fall back on the browser for convenience. For instance, Google spreadsheets are hopelessly slow with large datasets and models.

UPDATE: Wired has had a better look

  • Web-Excel will allow real-time collaboration but the web versions of Word and PowerPoint won’t (for now)
  • Mac Office users won’t be able to use the integration between desktop and web apps until the new Mac version of Office appears (2011?)
  • MS’s strategy appears – unsurprisingly – to be to make the desktop apps essential and the web apps a useful appendage. For instance, it appears that you have to create documents with the desktop apps; you can then do simple editing with the web apps.

If this last point is true, MS are trying to seize the horns of the innovator’s dilemma – when someone overtakes your innovation (we won’t dwell on that point), do you continue with the old or switch to the new? MS might be trying to do both. Given inertia in the market, they might succeed.

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Mar 31 2009
Technology

Microsoft scores – and then an own goal

At Conosco, we’re great cheerleaders for web-based applications for our customers – they promise cheap, enterprise-class services with low upfront investment and unlimited scalability. Ideal for one of our ambitious startups. Who wants to run their own servers these days?

So Microsoft’s lumbering approach to this area has kept us all in suspense – will it make a successful transition to this new technical era, as it belatedly did when Internet Explorer crushed Netscape?

Well, we’re now getting a clearer view – and it’s confused (of course) and inflicts unnecessary self-harm (of course).

  • Companies with less than 100 users can get Office Live Workspace, a new filesharing service that is simple, intuitive and slick. It will be a winner – not just because it’s better than Google Docs or Zoho, but because it lets you set up a shared folder structure across a whole company, which the others don’t.
  • There’s also a variant, Office Live Small Business, which adds a web site, email and various business applications. Forget it – the email appears to be Hotmail which simply isn’t up to business needs. Use hosted Exchange instead.
  • The large-company product is “Business Productivity Online Suite” (BPOS), which includes Exchange, Sharepoint (filesharing) and Office Communications (instant messenger). The clumsy name is a warning – you get Sharepoint in all its snarling complexity. BPOS is a dog.

Ah, but MS will realise its error and release Office Live for larger companies? Don’t count on it – MS has form here. It has a great product called Windows Small Business Server, which offers an out-of-the-box server with filesharing, Exchange, SQL, Active Directory, a Domain Controller and more. But it has restrictions, such as 75GB of mailbox space, which mean that at 50-100 users you have to upgrade to a full set of servers, with massively larger setup costs. We’ve often wanted to save money for our customers by installing SBS, but hit its arbitrary limitations.

Will MS force customers of over 100 users to learn the fiendish Sharepoint maze?

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