Reinventing Office Software

We continue to be fascinated with the upsurge (after a long pause) of new approaches to office work.  Many of these come from brand new companies with a clean sheet of paper and a bright idea.  But quite a few come from well-known and well-established companies rethinking their approach to better fit the changes they are observing in what customers want and need.

We will, of course, be reporting on both.  In some sense, we know what will happen:

	Most of these products won’t make it – it’s a tough market with lots of competition and not much room for making mistakes.
	For small start-ups, almost everything has to go right, so we’d expect fewer of them to succeed on their own.  On the other hand, some of them will succeed in other ways – becoming important product and technology contributors to bigger vendors’ product portfolios.  (Think how many products are acquisitions, from MS-DOS to PowerPoint and FrontPage, from IBM’s Tivoli and Lotus to most of the CA product line.)
	A few of these products – from startups or from established players – will be just the right combination of product, timing, and price – and will manage to communicate that to the marketplace.  Those products will soar!

I think I’ve just spotted one of these rare birds – but then the fun is partly in the guessing and partly in the waiting (with breath held) to see what happens. One of the things to watch is how the establishment behaves.  Does it continue milking the cow – or does it recognize that it’s time to note the change in tastes and head off in another direction?  Either is possible, but the endgames are very different.

We’ll be returning to this subject quite a bit, we’d guess, over the next 12 or more months.  We’re thinking of writing a report – and perhaps putting together a conference on the subject.  Let us know what you think about that.  

 

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