Office Becoming Client for .NET

Microsoft’s Office application suite is suffering from success. Estimated to control about 95% of the market for business productivity applications, the suite has few desktops left to conquer. Its feature set was so complete even four years ago, with Office 97, that most Office users have not bothered to upgrade further. Such comfortable users spell trouble for Microsoft because they generate no revenue. The company’s response is multipronged, covering changes in volume licensing, broadening the Office brand to cover more applications, encouraging developers to make more use of the Office “development platform,” and, most important, positioning Office as the preferred desktop client for the Web services that will be unleashed by Microsoft’s .NET vision.

Ultimately this strategy aims to maintain the importance of the Microsoft-dominated desktop PC in the face of a serious threat partly of Microsoft’s making: the ubiquitous Web browser, a thin, commodity client that is increasingly used to access applications running on Web servers. Available for every popular hardware platform, the hypertext browser is agnostic about not only the operating system it runs on but also the operating system of the server it accesses. The browser could give IBM, Oracle, Sun, and other competitors the last laugh at Microsoft’s expense: if market power moves to the server, where competitors dominate, Microsoft’s desktop will increasingly be relegated to a mere window on the Internet.