5 ms·

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, bri

by adwhit 9y ago

I kind of amazed that Microsoft are still successfully charging SO MUCH for their absolutely run-of-the-mill OS and Office products. Office, in particular, brings in something like $25bn/year revenue with presumably very healthy margins. For a product that has hardly changed in 20 years. It's a good product, sure. But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn. The power of monopoly capitalism.

walkingolof 9y ago
Problem is that you wont complete any RFPs without that "junk" that "nobody" uses, even if its just 1 percent that uses those functions of the users, those 1 percent is spread out on all the big companies that pay a big part of those $25B.
blowski 9y ago
You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook. Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.
- adwhit 9y ago
  For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros. MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user. Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win every time. Our best hope is that someone like Google pours money into a fully-compatible fully-featured desktop replacement out of sheer spite.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Not even MS products from the Office are fully compatible with each other - I've seen issues with documents produced by older Offices being mangled in newer ones (compounded by locale differences). DOC/DOCX compatibility across different products is a tire fire, there is no solution on the horizon.
tzahola 9y ago
The real value is not in MS Office itself, but the ~30 years worth of mission-critical infrastructure built on top of it which MS customers can't afford to replace.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  And training. Infrastructure can be replaced at cost, training is harder.
roel_v 9y ago
"But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn." Well, let's do some back of the envelope calculations. Let's say you can tap an incredibly cheap source of programmers, so that you can employ large numbers of them for 100k / year - this includes buildings, equipment, but also support staff and managers and what not. That would give you 10k man years of work. Star Office/Open Office/LibreOffice has existed for what, 20 years? So that's say 500 programmers. I'm not sure what the head counts on the various teams working on that have been, probably less than 500, but not an order of magnitude less. So considering that OO hasn't been able to replicate anywhere near the functionality of Office (I'm talking not just basic document processor here, but things like the VBA environment, and Outlook, and Access, and all the programmable components, etc.), I don't think you can say that 1bn is all that much. Of course you could say oh but we don't need all the legacy stuff Star Office once did, and we'd just be a 100 coders with no managers working from our bedrooms eating pizzas, and we'd only build the 20% of things people would actually use, and we have much better tooling now so it'll be faster, etc. You'd still have to convince people to switch, in order to save what - $100 / year? 150? That's what, 1/2 day of work, if that, per user for a company? Sure a saving is a saving, but I don't see how you can claim that Office or Windows are 'expensive', in the overall scheme of things.
Piskvorrr 9y ago
You underestimate the power of the MS Office. Or rather, the flexibility of MS Access, to be specific - it's not "just" a DB, it's a prototyping environment (with a rather unfortunate tendency to protoduction, but that's hardly MS's fault). As for Excel and Word - those are 80/20 replaceable for LibreOffice or what-have-you (definitely for SOHO purposes: it will work, mostly), but it took over a decade of concerted effort to get there. Making a powerful word processor or a spreadsheet processor is orders of magnitude harder than it seems at the first glance.

by adwhit 9y ago

walkingolof 9y ago

Problem is that you wont complete any RFPs without that "junk" that "nobody" uses, even if its just 1 percent that uses those functions of the users, those 1 percent is spread out on all the big companies that pay a big part of those $25B.

blowski 9y ago

You wouldn’t believe the number of workflows hardcoded to Excel and Outlook. Those two products alone guarantee that Office is here to stay for years.

adwhit 9y ago
For sure. I've seen complete trading systems written in Excel macros. MS have played their hand very astutely and have managed to capture a large fraction of the enormous gap between cost-to-producer and value-to-user. Keeping things that way is worth $100bn market cap to them, and challenging them is worth relative peanuts to anyone else. Of course they're going to win every time. Our best hope is that someone like Google pours money into a fully-compatible fully-featured desktop replacement out of sheer spite.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Not even MS products from the Office are fully compatible with each other - I've seen issues with documents produced by older Offices being mangled in newer ones (compounded by locale differences). DOC/DOCX compatibility across different products is a tire fire, there is no solution on the horizon.

tzahola 9y ago

The real value is not in MS Office itself, but the ~30 years worth of mission-critical infrastructure built on top of it which MS customers can't afford to replace.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
And training. Infrastructure can be replaced at cost, training is harder.

roel_v 9y ago

"But a clean-room reimplementation of the bits that people actually care about surely couldn't cost more than $1bn." Well, let's do some back of the envelope calculations. Let's say you can tap an incredibly cheap source of programmers, so that you can employ large numbers of them for 100k / year - this includes buildings, equipment, but also support staff and managers and what not. That would give you 10k man years of work. Star Office/Open Office/LibreOffice has existed for what, 20 years? So that's say 500 programmers. I'm not sure what the head counts on the various teams working on that have been, probably less than 500, but not an order of magnitude less. So considering that OO hasn't been able to replicate anywhere near the functionality of Office (I'm talking not just basic document processor here, but things like the VBA environment, and Outlook, and Access, and all the programmable components, etc.), I don't think you can say that 1bn is all that much. Of course you could say oh but we don't need all the legacy stuff Star Office once did, and we'd just be a 100 coders with no managers working from our bedrooms eating pizzas, and we'd only build the 20% of things people would actually use, and we have much better tooling now so it'll be faster, etc. You'd still have to convince people to switch, in order to save what - $100 / year? 150? That's what, 1/2 day of work, if that, per user for a company? Sure a saving is a saving, but I don't see how you can claim that Office or Windows are 'expensive', in the overall scheme of things.

Piskvorrr 9y ago

You underestimate the power of the MS Office. Or rather, the flexibility of MS Access, to be specific - it's not "just" a DB, it's a prototyping environment (with a rather unfortunate tendency to protoduction, but that's hardly MS's fault). As for Excel and Word - those are 80/20 replaceable for LibreOffice or what-have-you (definitely for SOHO purposes: it will work, mostly), but it took over a decade of concerted effort to get there. Making a powerful word processor or a spreadsheet processor is orders of magnitude harder than it seems at the first glance.