April 26, 2006

ThinkFree's MSFT Office Competition. But Microsoft is NOT Scared nor should be.

PC World wrote a review of ThinkFree's newest hosted suite of software (spreadsheet, wordprocessor, etc) and writes However, even with a few beta bumps, the service is impressive. The large amount of storage and the easy sharing and collaboration make it ideal for workgroups. In fact, the company recently released a server edition, and it plans to offer small and midsize businesses a subscription service--without ads--later this year. I have a feeling the Microsoft Office folks are quaking in their boots, and if they aren't, they should be.

While I agree that ThinkFree's offering is compelling, or that of OpenOffice.org which offers free software to download - what none of these software offers is a complete ecosystem of office productivity that Microsoft offers.

For those who simply need to print letters and crunch numbers, sure any office suite will do. However, many businesses rely on some level of integration or working together of Microsoft Office software to run their business.

The only Microsoft product I use is Outlook for addresses and my to do list. I use Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox for email and web browser. Microsoft is cautious of the rising competition but there's still a lot of value in many businesses using Microsoft software.

While Microsoft's dominance in the operating system and office suite market is slowly eroding, the market is so large that any competitor has a huge uphill battle to try to duplicate what Microsoft has done and how it has positioned itself.

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