IBM appears to be getting ready to offer its Lotus Symphony suite as a hosted application, competing directly with Google Apps and Microsoft's Office Live. Does IBM's entry into the on-demand desktop application space signal trouble for Office?
Microsoft's Office Live strategy is still primarily focused on small business, for groups of 10 or fewer users. It's not an enterprise-changing play. Microsoft's enterprise applications on demand are more in the form of services, not desktop tools -- Exchange and SharePoint, for example.
IBM started giving away Symphony for free in September, following a similar path to Sun's with StarOffice (though OpenOffice.org is admittedly not the same thing as Sun's commercial release). The chances, however, of a free Symphony desktop suite displacing Office in the corporate world are close to nil. And while a hosted version might be interesting to organizations still using Lotus Notes, it's doubtful that it would upset anyone's applecart, aside from Google's efforts. Here's why:
Office is the de-facto standard. Despite years of efforts by Sun and IBM to get OpenDoc accepted as a de jure standard -- often successfully -- Microsoft Office is still the tool of choice for most organizations because, simply, it's the tool of choice for most organizations. A tautology, no doubt -- but no less true. Even the exceptions to the rule are telling: Massachusetts, which made waves when it made OpenDoc its official document format standard, still uses Office, albeit with a file converter. And it will for a long time to come. Which leads us to our second reason...
Free software doesn't come with free retraining. Though the applications look a lot like Office, there are still enough differences in the behavior of OpenOffice, Symphony, and Google Apps to give your average corporate user a bit of a learning curve. I've used all of them, and only the most talented of interface hackers would be able to easily slide from one to another without having to get used to the differences for a while before becoming as productive as they were in Office. And given that they're teaching kids Office in elementary school now, that reeducation is something most employers probably don't want to deal with.
Office is "cheap enough." The acquisition cost of the Office suite, per user, is significantly less than the retail price consumers pay -- and even consumers hardly ever pay full price. Compared to the cost of retraining users on new applications, it's insignificant.
"Cool" doesn't get work done. While hosted applications can offer a lot of Web 2.0 cool points, and do provide some interesting collaborative capabilities, they're best suited to early adopters and small teams -- just the audience Microsoft has gone after with Office Live. The collaborative functionality already exists in other applications within most corporate environments, in other forms -- such as Exchange and SharePoint.
You're trading one architecture problem for another. In a corporate environment, there's concern over capturing workflow for compliance and the security of an Internet-based tool -- which can be solved by hosting internally. But if you're hosting it internally, you're really just solving one problem -- software distribution -- and trading it for another set. Now, you've got to manage the servers, deal with network bandwidth demands as XML traffic goes up, and shift your storage needs from network shared drives to server-side storage.
That's not to say there isn't anything interesting about hosted desktop applications. Hundreds of organizations are already using hosted applications -- through desktop virtualization via Citrix and Terminal Server.
But does IBM's enterprise credibility mean trouble for Microsoft on the desktop? Not really. Redmond should pay close attention, though, to the parts of hosted applications that users actually use.
Posted by Sean Gallagher on November 14, 2007 03:00 AM
