They got stuck, and they lost their one-time market dominance.By the time Novell bought WordPerfect, WP had already lost its way. But Novell didn’t get it – they were busy arguing why they should keep the Novell stack, rather than go with the Internet standard.

Back then, the easy Internet connectivity we have today was still a dream. I did some consulting for Novell in 1995 – showed them how they could (and should) become the gateway to the Internet for business. Today’s announcement does nothing to address that basic fact.ĭrewhyde – Interesting comment. Commoditization of their core cash cows is what Microsoft fears most, yet, we believe it is utterly unavoidable. One word captures this process: commoditization. A lot of what we are working on at Zoho involves such integration effort, both within the Zoho suite as well as with a lot of partners. That is how we see the mail & office suite evolving – they become so nicely componentized (and affordable!) that they get integrated into every business application. What are considered crown jewels on the desktop today will become features to be integrated into a variety of business applications, and not on fat clients, but on the web. Therein lies the fundamental dilemma for Microsoft and the fundamental opportunity for players like Zoho. Not when the other multi-billion franchise, is also looking a bit wobbly. We do not believe the $16 billion in revenue/profit is defensible, but our guess is that Steve Ballmer does not want to be the CEO who gives that news to shareholders. Having said that, what we see here is more evidence of Microsoft’s strategic muddle: how far do they want to go with their online offerings? They clearly recognize the risk – almost $16 billion in revenue (and almost the same in gross profit) is involved here, one of the largest franchises of software. Let me make it clear that we do respect Microsoft, and we believe Office 2010 and its web components are going to be really, really good. After all, they own 90+% of the office market today, which is why we have always viewed the real competition (for both Zoho and Google) to be Microsoft. To paraphrase Gates himself, we have always viewed both Zoho and Google as stealing Microsoft’s customer base. What do we think? First, at Zoho, we have always considered Microsoft to be the one to beat. Today, Microsoft finally unveiled(with a generous definition of “unveiled”) its Office 2010 product, along with the anticipated web ‘components’.

Office web components 2010