Saturday 3 September 2011

Is Microsoft Office still the industry leader in text-editing applications?

By Jack Brisk


Microsoft Office 2010 is the most recent version of Microsoft's suite of productiveness and text-editing applications. It contains a great deal of new features, improvement in user interface and file sharing capacities. The truly huge transformation happened in Microsoft's attitude to the online world. Now Microsof Office suit includes free web services for producing text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It's an attempt of Microsoft to take it's slice of the market for online word-processing and to slow down the growth of it's most dangerous competitor in this market "Google.

Microsoft Word has been under a large amount of pressure recently from many sides. There are standard competitors such as open-source Open Office which is completely free and is available on all the important platforms, Windows, Mac and even Linux. There is also iWork from Apple which is a suit of productiveness programmes and other software choices to Microsoft Office.

But Microsoft Office now has to face competittion from a new side, Google introduced it's Google Docs serice that can enable users to create text documents, spreadsheets and presentations completely absolutely free. They even give the chance for the users to keep the files on Google's servers and have them accessible from everywhere. Google Docs made it super straightforward to share documents and work on a project with co-workers who can be placed all around the globe.

Microsoft is responding to this new competition from Google by creating online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This is surely a step in the right direction and can help Microsoft to keep it's users. However , it has got to be said that Microsoft does not feel so cushty in the sphere of online services, as it is very much an old-skool old-school software company.

There is a great number of tiny enhancements and changes in Microsoft Office 2010, but the web Word, Excel and Powerpoint services are the crucial one. This is the battle which will define the way forward for Microsoft Excel. The sole way how Microsoft Office can sustain it's dominant position in the future is by transforming itself into an internet service, rather than installing text-editing software users will in the future possibly just go to microsoftoffice.com to form word documents.




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