Microsoft Office 11: Latest Productivity App Or Quest For Market Domination?

That battle is now at the very heart of the pending antitrust court case, and the ultimate ruling could have a major impact on the next phase of Microsoft's plans to change the applications landscape.

Microsoft Office 11 is at the core of the developer's emerging attempt to leverage its tools and operating systems dominance in the applications marketplace.

After spending the past few years educating the market about the value proposition of XML, business process integration and related Web services technologies, Microsoft is on the verge of delivering its first set of major applications that leverage the Microsoft .Net platform. And that plan goes way beyond simply XML-enabling the separate productivity applications that make up the Microsoft Office suite.

Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, has been touting the benefits of this strategy in various keynotes throughout the year. What is really on Microsoft's mind is nothing short of positioning Microsoft Office as the de facto front end for every application throughout the enterprise. And given the current penetration of those applications, the odds are more than good that Microsoft will make that happen.

For as long as anyone can remember, the two biggest weaknesses in the enterprise application space have been the crude user interfaces associated with those applications, and users' inability to easily integrate other mission-critical software with those applications.

The arrival of Microsoft .Net and Web services is slowly taking the latter issue off the table. And with Microsoft Office 11, the company is in a position to leverage Web services to make Office a universal set of tools for accessing data housed in enterprise applications.

What that means is that rather than training people on how to use an SAP or Siebel interface, people will be able to leverage familiar Microsoft Office applications, including the Microsoft portal software, to access data in any of those enterprise applications. The first real tangible example of how this architecture will play out will come from Microsoft itself.

Later this year, Microsoft intends to roll out its long-awaited CRM application, which will feature tight integration with Microsoft Office and the Microsoft portal offering. It won't take long before that paradigm starts to replace the arcane user interfaces that enterprise application vendors have traditionally provided with their software.

Right now, the only alternative is the portal platforms being developed by IBM, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, Plumtree, Epicentric and a host of other vendors. But all those companies have one major problem: None of them can plug Microsoft Office applications into a portal framework in quite the same way that Microsoft can.

Depending upon your point of view, this could be the greatest thing to happen to corporate computing in the last 10 years in terms of increasing productivity, or it could be the latest, most dangerous form of disingenuous behavior by the industry's biggest bully.

Both statements are probably true.

What's your perspective? I can be reached at (650) 513-4227 or via e-mail at [email protected].