aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Office in the crosshairs

Om Malik:

Earlier today IBM (IBM) threw its weight behind the Open Office project, a move that will give the open source productivity suite some much needed support in the enterprises.  And if that wasn’t enough, now Google (GOOG) has upped the ante on Microsoft Office by teaming up with consulting company, Cap Gemini. Cap Gemini is going to help push the Google Office aka Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) to the enterprises.  If you consider dozens of start-ups with their own twist on Office 2.0 as potential competitors, then it seems it is open season on Microsoft Office - one of the biggest cash engines for Microsoft (MSFT). The Cap Gemini deal seems to worry Microsoft… Cap Gemini can help overcome the lack-of-support stigma for Google. A handful of large US corporations have tried out Google Apps in recent past. Large enterprises are getting increasingly comfortable with using software as a service. The success of Salesforce.com and other such offerings are indicative of these changing attitudes. [...]

The commoditization of software has made its impact felt on the server software, web servers, storage servers, and application servers ( J-Boss). If someone was out charging high prices for products, open source and lower cost products emerged and caused rapid commoditization. GAPE is trying to accelerate the process and bring it to productivity apps.