What if Office365 Added Custom Domains, Could It ‘Kill’ Google Apps for Business?
Microsoft announced the next version if its Office suite. Chances are that you’ve probably used Microsoft’s Office – a lot, even if you’re an open-sourcer now; we can all agree that Office is one of the most popular and among the best office tools out there. On the other hand, if you’re a cloud lover, then you’re probably using Google Apps, right? The ability to access your files anywhere is probably more worthy than the ability to format text in more than a dozen fonts.
However, this might just be the problem. Which version of Office are you using right now? 2000, XP, 2007, 2010? Does it really matter? Nope, it doesn’t. Microsoft Word is already filled with great features and there’s not much Microsoft can add to it to make it better – it doesn’t get any better than where it is now. Can they change that? Yep, by using cloud. Kicking Google Apps right in the… cloud – with custom domains.
Office Reached Its ‘Glass Ceiling’
A few years ago, I noticed how people just didn’t react to Office updates. A new version is published, but no one gets excited, no one (except IT journalists) wants to try it out. Why is that? Well, as mentioned before, Office is a great tool, dare I say – it’s perfect. It has reached a certain level of functionalities which can’t get any more better – there are no updates to that.
Sure, some cosmetic updates are nice, like the Ribbon or cell styles in Excel, Smart Objects, new PowerPoint templates and animations, image frames… However, these don’t add any extra ‘upgradeable’ value – they’re probably not the reason to upgrade. Each new release of the Office apps is a competition to itself and honestly, if cloud computing isn’t so popular today, we’d be stuck with Office 2010 for a long time.
Office as a Service
Microsoft is aware of that fact, they know that they have a perfect product which can hardly be topped; they also know that they need something new, something fresh to wake up Office users (and probably get them into their own ‘live-cloud-social’ web). And that’s what they did with their latest release – Office365 (cloud version of the Office) will be included in most of the Office licenses.
That way you’ll be able to install Office on several machines and get even more users on Office365; Microsoft is obviously aiming at Google Docs, and frankly, I think they just might win this war. Google Docs are great, but they’re far away from Microsoft’s Office, especially Word or Excel. Now when the power of the Office get pumped with the power of the Cloud, there will be no reason for you to use Google Docs anymore.
Say Hello to Domains
You know what would be cool – and probably a deal-maker for Office365? If Microsoft would allow companies to use Office365 under custom domain names – something like Google Apps, but much more advanced. No more company.google.com/a/who-knows-what but simply company.me/office – or – office.company.me. Technically, this isn’t a big issue, so lets keep fingers crossed for Microsoft to do this!
It’s actually an interesting turn of events, from being its own competition, Microsoft managed to become a serious threat to Google, soon-to-be-former ruler of cloud office applications. Let’s wait and see.
