Right now, Microsoft enjoys the sheer dominance of the business market. Almost all businesses make use of Microsoft’s Office software in order to handle email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other desktop publishing formats. Competition in the market has been close to little over the past few years abut Microsoft is not going to let its guard down one bit.
As it stands, MS has control of more than 80% of the market, with other products such as Open Office (a free Open source word editor) and web services such as Google Docs being used by a very small minority of users. Despite this Microsoft has been beefing up and innovating their Office suite of software in order to keep up with the latest trends. They are also experimenting heavily with the use of cloud based storage and processing.
Google Docs is expected to improve a whole lot more with the growing rise of interest in the upcoming Chrome operating system (not just the Browser). It is expected to be released in the latter half of this year, making the new version of the MS Office a crucial update to keep the software on top of competition.
Microsoft is doing more than adding more new features to their program; they are also changing their marketing approach. It has been reported that the system developer will also be promoting the new Office 2010 programs in the widely used social networking site, Facebook –exposing many young users to the Office software. The Office Web Apps will certainly be part of the promotions as a direct competitor to Google’s Docs services.
Sadly, it appears that the annoying little paperclip from the previous versions of Microsoft Word and Office will still be around to annoy users, but at least there will always be the option to disable the feature.
Tags: Google-Docs, MS-Office, Open-Office