Office Competitors and Collaboration

Posting resumes after a week of vacation and another week of the flu. Just before my absence, an article about MS Office Killers was published in Red Herring. The article makes one very good point and misses another.

The first point is collaboration. Before I went away, Ilan (one of our brilliant programmers) and I worked with a Web-site design firm on the layout of one of our Web pages. Initially, the firm wanted access to our Web-site page source to make the changes on their own. For both security and quality reasons, we were not going to let that happen.

Instead, we collaborated. We fired up our MSN messengers and started working together on the page. Everyone was messaging; Ilan was making the actual changes. The result: a horrible mess! No one could complete a thought, bad changes canceled out good ones, and productivity was nowhere to be found. It took us two and a half hours to do work that could have been done in half an hour.

The Red Herring is right: “Collaboration tools have become critical.” What they missed is the reason why Office competitors will have a hard time, at least when it comes to Excel. It’s not because of Microsoft’s enormous, well-funded marketing machine. It’s not even because of the enormous install base (more than 400 million). It’s because of the special relationship Excel users have with Excel. Excel users are experts; they love Excel and are proud of their knowledge and skill. You’ll have to give Excel users much more than a mere Wiki if you want them to glance at you.

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Yoav Ezer 
Filed Under Collaboration

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