Game On Microsoft!
Google adds Native MS Office editing to Google Docs editor
Quote: "In the battle for the enterprise market, Google today launched a fairly big gun. The Microsoft Office suite, is, it’s fair to say fairly ubiquitous across corporate IT culture around the world, but Google is trying to change that, but to make it easy, they’ve added native MS Office editing to Google Docs."
Okay. If true, this is a very big deal. If true, Google will find itself back in the race to dominate Cloud Computing. But I will wait to see it before believing.
Microsoft Office has dominated office productivity for over 25 years. By 1998, anti trust claims against Microsoft alleged that the tech giant had a monopoly grip on 98% of business productivity systems. In the wake of the anti trust suit, my business partners and I worked for years on the Oasis Open Document Technical Committee. The sole purpose of which was to break the iron grip office applications had on document based information; to provide office applications with an open XML standard that ALL applications could read, write, layout properly and process.
Everyone on the TC knew the dawn of a time was at hand when many applications would be needed to operate on a document or workflow of documents. The world needed an open, Internet ready document format, capable of handling the application complexities of complex Office productivity.
If this news report is true, then the Oasis Open Document TC should take a well deserved bow. Their herculean effort would make ODF the most successful failure in tech standards history.
If this is true.
And, the incredible advance this breakthrough represents comes at a most important time. The world is racing ahead, making a great transition from an aging Windows client/server platform model to a highly mobile Cloud Computing model. We are way beyond the point of no return.
The great transition began with the Internet gradually establishing itself as a universal platform integrating communications, computation and collaboration. The platform evolution somehow survived the browser wars between Microsoft and the rest of the world. But it really took off in 2009 with the introduction of the iPhone; a mobile device finally integrating communications, computation and collaboration. Productivity magic in the palm of your hand, soon enough connecting to the most powerful arrays of computational resources ever assembled.
Suddenly we find ourselves in an AI world, where the power of super computing centers can be delivered anywhere, anytime, to anyone. The computational power of serverless computing in the Cloud is mind boggling.
Only one problem here. We have years of vital information, much of which is in-process and critical to profitable workflows, locked into application bound databases and document resources.
Productivity = Communications X computational power X information (data + documents).
Without information (data and documents), there is nothing for computational power to act on. And communication becomes noise. (hint hint Twitter and Facebook :)
Because most data in application bound databases is SQL ready, moving it or accessing it from a Cloud super computer center is easy. Sure, you lose the application processing power, but the raw data can be moved and accessed. Which means that Oracle does not have anywhere near the lock on data that Microsoft has on documents. And you can see that clearly as the Cloud Computing fortunes of each company shows.
Look, no company is going to move to the Cloud without also taking their information with them. No company is going to endure the disruptive cost of ripping out and replacing existing applications and services to move to the Cloud. Especially if it means leaving important information behind.
In 2014 Microsoft released Office 365, the Cloud Computing version of the venerable Microsoft Office. The company went from zero to an annual run rate of $22 Billion per year in no time flat. That my friends is the incredible power of being able to make accessible the billions of documents that fuel so many in-process workflows. Companies can now make that great transition.
In this context, one can easily see how important this native document announcement from Google really is. If true, they are back in the chase. It is probably a $60 billion per year and up market potential. For sure, it is ESSENTIAL to any document based Artificial Intelligence services.
Let the race begin. I hope this is real.
~ge~
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