I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
Rare glimpse on the economics of software companies with scale.
Microsoft expanding Mac team ahead of new products
It’s believed the Mac BU currently employs around 180 people whose products — including Office, Messenger, and Remote Desktop Client — combine to generate over $350 million in revenues each year.
Say the average person’s annual cost is, say, $US150k. That’s 27m. Even with a lot of marketing spend that’s a good return.
When pressed for details, a spokesperson for the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant would say only that the company expects to release new versions of Office for Mac every 2 to 3 years.
I was hoping the days of 3+ year releases were gone. Seeing the progress that web office companies like Zoho are making in months - imagine how far they’ll go in 3 years.
OSX is being updated every few months. 10.5.4 is almost here. 10.5.3 had quite a few new features. So complexity is no excuse.
I’ve been playing a around a bit with web office tools. The collaboration features are awesome, but they are still clumsy to use. As Silverlight, Flash, AIR, Java and other web hosted runtimes roll out over the next year I’m sure we’ll see office parts that you can embed. You would have to think that’s all going to accelerate well within the 3 year horizon.
It staggers me that the biggest horizontal categories are so ripe for innovation and the door is open so wide. And the rewards for getting it right are so large.
The use-case of office documents are they are ‘hot’ for probably a day - maybe even just an hour of intense collaboration. Once a document is done, 99.99% of them never change again.
Probably 5 times a day I’m hunkered over someone else’s PC collaborating on a document. Or I’m emailing changes around that have to be in series or we have a version control nightmare. That slows collaboration and minimizes review cycles. Worse it’s embarrassing to have to go around again at the last minute. An emotional, painful response. Something you seek when looking for high value problems to solve.
It would be so good if we could use all that processing power on the desktop to deal with the rendering of multiple users attacking a document at once. Easy rollback of changes. Full tracking ability and difference detection. The bandwidth requirements are minimal as it only needs to keep a track of a few people typing and where their mouse is.
Use the power of the computer to empower across the world what people are doing next to each other everyday. It’s such an obvious scenario.
I hope that’s what the Office and MacBU teams are working on.
We are seeing innovation in this space. Zoho seems to be in front technically, speeding past Google. The experience the web guys are gaining in collaborative editing will be invaluable. But I wish they would work on fat client versions as well. They seem reluctant to charge. Hard to find any pricing info on Zoho. I think they should charge so they can accelerate investment.
These numbers show it is a high value space. New entrants getting close to the sacred cow will hopefully drive faster innovation in Office.
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I just bought my first Mac at home, and for the first time in my 15+ year career, MS Office was nowhere on my radar. Even on the PC’s that my kids use, I do not have office installed. (I wrote a quick post about it http://coachboz.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/what-does-microsoft-face-in-10-years/)
Couldn’t agree with you more on the intense bursts of collaboration, followed by long periods of static documents sitting and collecting dust. I guess SharePoint would make an argument that they are already there. But it, too, is clunky in its native format.
On my Mac, I just installed the beta version of OpenOffice and have to say for my needs, it’s more than adequate and now opens up the latest versions of office docs (the one’s that end in “x”).
Google Docs is still unusable for me for anything other than the most basic reference materials (keeping all my online ID’s, for example).
2-3 year releases is going to make folks more and more impatient as we get accustomed to update every time we point to a website.
Rod why don’t you look at Authorit.com for collaboration.
Billy, when you kids go to get jobs, do you think they will be using OpenOffice?
@Dermott and you think it’s important to be using the same tool at home/school? The key issue that children are encouraged to use computers for creative thinking. Word, excel and powerpoint are not going to create the next generation of leaders, innovators and scientists.
The vast majority of us and I mean 90-95% use a fraction of the functionality of Word, Excel etc.. A basic word processor is all that is needed . We are paying for a Ferrari but never get out of second gear as we drive to shops and back like an old granny.. The cost of supporting that Ferrari is RAM, HD and processor cycles (and the dent in most wallets/IT budgets).
There are heaps of Office options out there that need the support of the masses. Also those apps need better marketing to lift them above the B*** S*** that Microsoft push out.
Rod, also for collaboration I’ve been seeing some stuff on the new Acrobat.com. They have word processors that are heavy on the collaboration and version control..
@Stan
A ferrari? Word? Excel? Hmm. Maybe if Ferraris went slower, and looked crappier, and they hid the steering wheel in the boot under the spare tyre…
But I agree with your point. Most kids don’t care what theyre using, so long as it does what they need it to do without thinking about it.
@Rod
Not sure complexity isn’t an issue here, for same reason that MS took 7 years to roll out the travesty of “are you really sure you want to do that” vista. Its the underlying complexity of the architecture, not the functional complexity of the app thats important.
I think the interesting thing is how apps are progressing towards the “What do you really want to do” mindset. Now, the big question is, how do services that provide one set of functionality really well collaborate with other services? That really is SaaS, which is not being realised now.
Eg: Say one offering gives awesome document collaboration tools as Rod wants. But doesn’t do say type-setting well (as it shouldnt). But sometimes, you want typesetting functionality, which could be provided by another offering. How do they collaborate seamlessly, so its trivial to the user? Whats the mechanism? Who supplies it?
@Dermott
My kids are 10, 8, and 4 so the 10 year old is a little over 10 years away from starting work (wow, 1/2 way there… no way I’m that old!) but I digress…
10 years AGO, I was using… MS Office. Ugh. How discouraging is that? And at that point, it had usurped Word Perfect by a good 5 years before that. So Office has had quite the market hold for a looong time.
I can’t imagine they will let it go, but it’s depressing to think we’ll still be using MS Office 10 years from now. OpenOffice? Probably not. I’m hoping there’s a big shift somewhere in there that changes our productivity tools. All I know is that my cousins in college see a “computer” as a bit of a relic only to be used when necessary. And if it’s not connected to the Internet, it may as well be a boat anchor. Will be fun watching how this generation enters the workforce.
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