by Joel Dreyfuss, Redherring.com, 19 September 2007
One day, we may look back on Sept. 17 as the official beginning of the end for Microsoft’s dominance. Two separate events signaled the shift; one was the European Union court’s harsh ruling against Microsoft itself, charging that the world’s No. 1 software maker had abused its monopoly power to harm competitors. The verdict was expected – and showed that European bureaucrats had more courage than the U.S. Justice Department.
The other important announcement was IBM’s offering of Lotus Symphony, a suite of office applications, for free. This is just the latest bullet to the head of Microsoft’s cash cow. Years ago, when Google CEO Eric Schmidt ran Novell – and tried to save the faltering networking company – he argued that Microsoft’s real stranglehold on the PC market was not the Windows operating system but its Office productivity software suite.
Most users could care less about operating systems, he said, but they wanted to run Microsoft Office to be compatible with everyone else. After all, Schmidt argued, others, including IBM (OS/2) and Apple (Macintosh), had already shown they could write a better operating system.
It is no surprise, then, that Google has gone after Microsoft by providing an ever-expanding list of online office applications that include a word processor, a spreadsheet, a calendar – and soon presentation software to compete with PowerPoint. Others have been chipping away at the office market that provides 40 percent of Microsoft’s revenues. Sun has also distributed its version of Open Office, a suite of apps developed under the open source model and therefore improvable by users that is also the basis of IBM’s offering.
Read More ....
No comments:
Post a Comment