Raju posted about an InfoWorld analysis of alternatives to MS office. What makes the analysis interesting is that for the first time (that I’ve seen) cloud based and Open Source products have been evaluated side by side.
As is often the case with these sorts of analyses, it’s what is left unsaid that is arguably more important than what is said.
Some things I’d like mentioned or assessed to make a comparison more meaningful;
An analysis of the benefits to be gained from the cloud based nature of two of the offerings (ability to mine web data etc)
The release cycle of cloud based vs Open Source software
A comparison of all four offerings in relation to MS Office itself
The InfoWorld analysis looked at the main productivity (documents, spreadsheet and presentation) - it didn’t look at associated offerings from the same vendors (Zoho business, Google’s other offerings etc). As Raju pointed out in his post, if you look where the cloud based apps have come from in only a couple of years, it’s plain to see that their development velocity is far higher than the installed competitors - extrapolate that fact out for another few years and we’re sure to see cloud based apps streak ahead of the competitors - the one question that remains is what is Microsoft’s strategy around S+S for MS Office?
ACCMan bought to my attention to the fact that FreeAgentCentral, the UK based SaaS accounting solution, is including tax tips into its corporate blog. As he points out this fulfills many uses;
Users get free information which they’d otherwise have to search for (read time and effort saving)
The third part contribution both build credibility and increases the feeling of community
By offering this additional information, FAC starts to become a magnet for useful stuff that’s directly related to the service offering. That increases traffic but also increases the likelihood that FAC is seen as a trusted resource.
In developing community, FAC is sparking further discussion about its service and discovering fresh requirements.
So it’s a double win - the software vendor wins credibility, design suggestions and eyeballs, while the users gain the sense of community, being listened to and a value add.
I had an email from a SaaS startup the other day that asked me to explain what I meant when I said that “SaaS businesses need to think about aggregation”. My response to him went thus;
in this environment, where there are lots of “me too” offerings, I really like SaaS platform plays. This is where a product takes in information from many different sources and puts it in one place where it is easy for the user. Examples could include - Salesforce with Google apps, Zoho allowing login with Google login, FreeAgentCentral giving free tax tips on its blog - it’s all about letting people come in to share So aggregation can be;
single sign-on
APIs
true aggregation (multiple data streams on one locale)
Good on FAC for seeing where this is heading - what will be the next aggregation play?
Rod posted about the economics of software companies. The basis of his post was some information out of Microsoft that told of the 180 person Mac business unit that generates $350mill per annum.
Rod pointed out that this is a significant return by anyone’s standards but that the 2-3 year release cycle is just too long - especially when compared to the likes of Zoho and other on-demand application providers who are releasing significant updates across their line up of products on a month by month basis.
Rod comments that;
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.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with Rod’s fat client comment, Kai-Fu lee, Google’s VP of engineering, and President of Google China, gave a presentation at the WWW2008 conference. He was specifically talking about cloud computing but one quote got my attention;
There are 600 million cellphone users in China, three billion worldwide, dwarfing the number of PCs that are Internet-accessible.
If you’re of the school that believe that the future is mobile, then any client-side component that limits the types of devices that’ll run it is sub-optimal. I guess it’s a question of balancing speed with ubiquitous accessibility (from a device perspective).
This ties into a discussion about what SaaS is really good for - which is aggregation. There were some comments in reply to Rod’s post some saying there is heaps of functionality in the incumbent solutions that we don’t use, some saying that the Google offerings don’t have enough functionality. Basically we’re seeing the fact that users requirements are all different. If we give up thinking about applications as one single stand alone offering and start thinking about them as different modules, we’re getting close to where we should be.
In the same way that Xero doesn’t do project management, but seamlessly integrates with an app that does, so to should we be thinking about office productivity apps along these lines. Agree on some standards that work across platforms (ie Office to OpenOffice to Zoho to Google) and then open them up. Allow those with an idea to take raw data and do different things with it
It’s another way to resolve the monetisation conundrum for on-demand office productivity apps - at the moment these offerings are massive one hit wonders - lets think of them as discrete components which we can pick and choose (and pay for) at will. If Joe software geek want to create a little app to automatically translate Powerpoint shows into Swahili, and someone want to pay him to use the app - then data portability should be no barrier.
At the CeBIT show, Zoho gave a presentation detailing just why online applications are different. At the same time Desire2Learn made a great video showing how easy, and useful, online notebook products can be.
Both of these videos reminded me of a discussion I had with an installed applications vendor recently. His main basis for discounting web apps as necessary, was that the remote access traits shared by all web apps can be replicated using various technical means for an installed app (terminal server, citrix whatever).
All of this kind of misses the point - web apps have benefits way beyond those of remote access anywhere. The three videos below (the two mentioned above and a pretty exciting one from Google apps) show just why this is the case. Enjoy!
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