Microsoft Office has huge market share – an estimated half a billion users, according to this interview with Microsoft manager Betsy Frost.
But it’s difficult to compete with free applications offered by well established Web software-as-a-service providers. Today, Google announced its web-based slide show application. This wasn’t a surprise. I mentioned Google’s office apps on 19 April and 23 February. These web-based apps don’t have all the features of Microsoft software, and Google doesn’t support third-party plugins. Plugins are software that hooks in to Microsoft Office applications to provide additional features.
When does free beat market share?
But web-based apps do allow users to share documents online, instead of emailing versions of documents. There are security concerns, of course. Google’s applications are tied into the company’s single signon (SSO) authentication system. Google does offer corporate and educational versions of these services, but storage is centralized in Google’s massive data network. Google isn’t offering a database product, but one could argue that the entire Google office suite is really a vast database full of XML-formatted documents and messages. Corporate customers pay Google US$50 per seat each year for the web-based office applications and email. I haven’t seen how Google controls document sharing on academic networks, either.
Web-based office software is becoming a key success factor for the largest Internet search sites. Email, calendar and address book applications are a logical offering. In most industries, companies must use email, but it’s often cheaper to let someone else run the servers. According to the New York Times, Yahoo just purchased Zimbra, a developer of web-based email services. Zimbra’s annual pricing is reasonable: $28 per seat for corporate customers. Universities pay $1 per student account, and $8 per employee account. At those prices, more universities are outsourcing their email systems. I discussed Google’s academic email services on 11 April. Of course, Yahoo is the dominant webmail provider with 181 million unique visitors each month. Google has only 18 million.
The New York Times reported today that IBM will launch its own downloadable version of Sun’s open source office suite. Users still have to install the IBM applications, so the versioning problem still exists.
But IBM is offering its software for free. Oddly enough, IBM resurrected the Lotus Symphony brand for this product. Of course, IBM is offering technical support for corporate users, but not for free.
