Nicholas Carr of Rough Type posted a recent blog note (see: Does Microsoft need consumers? Yes.) regarding the Microsoft offer for Yahoo and how Microsoft should position itself in the marketplace. He quotes business analyst Henry Blodget's opinion that "Microsoft should focus wholly on the business market, in particular on shifting to supplying web apps to corporations for a subscription fee as Salesforce.com does and as Google does with its premium edition of Google Apps. For Microsoft, cloud computing is all about "paid desktop licenses giving way to paid web-based licenses." Carr responds in the following way to this opinion (boldface emphasis mine):
Blodget is right to point out the big differences between supplying consumer applications and supplying business apps. But he's very much mistaken in dismissing the importance of the consumer market to Microsoft....But the importance of the consumer market to Microsoft goes well beyond money. There is no bright line between the use of Office in businesses and the use of Office in homes and schools. People's use of Office in their personal lives reinforces their use of Office in their professional lives, and vice versa. If people move away from using the Office programs at home and, particularly, at school, and instead adopt free alternatives like Google Apps or Zoho or Adobe's Buzzword, they also become less likely to require Office when at work. Lose the student, and eventually you may lose the professional worker that the student becomes.
As usual, Nicholas Carr is right on the money with his analysis. Microsoft and Yahoo are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I believe that the battle for the "hearts and minds" of the sophisticated users of the web is over and Google has already won the contest hands-down. As Carr correctly points out, it's all about how the web products and services of a company such as Google are used in the school, home, and the office that determines the winner and the losers.
Fast forward to a conference that I just attended in Philadelphia, the Molecular Summit. During a Q and A session, several of the faculty members referred in very strong terms to the criticality of Google search in their professional lives. This was in the context of a discussion about the relevance of various major software companies to healthcare IT. Another faculty member, a former executive with IBM, later expressed disappointment that the name of this company had not been raised in this discussion of healthcare IT.
IBM? Are you kidding? Here's a company that continues to make a lot of money providing IT services and commands great respect in the corporate world. However, it has become a non-player in the web-oriented business and personal lives of most computer-literate people. I use Google applications many times each day (Google Search, Google Alerts, Google Reader), all of which are superb and don't cost me a dime. For me personally, the relevance of both IBM and Microsoft are fading fast and I also don't see either making a substantial footprint in healthcare IT.
Comments