<Its clear that neither you nor Reginald have ever had to do this on a large scale or you wouldn't blithely refer to The Mind of Reg(TM). Changing a core package like the spreadsheet tool drags with it a rat-tail of costs ranging from dealing with archived files, training and support, integrating the product on the desktop, changing the currently active spreadsheets, making sure your customers have the same release as you so that you can convert them, ensuring that people who work at home are upgraded, etc. Time and the risk of error is more important than money in this case.>
I would like to participate in the market efficiencies discussion, but before I do, let's get some facts straight. Thure implies that the switching cost of productivity apps are overwhelming while I explicitly state that it is not necessarily so if the company with the minority market share takes care to minimize risk and costs of conversion. I gave examples on several platforms, and historical instances where Microsoft succeeded in going from o% share to 93% in short amount of time. Whose point appears more valid here?
Just three years ago, WordPerfect was the world's best-selling word processor, with more than half the market. Lotus 1-2-3, the venerable spreadsheet program, had a similar market share.
Dataquest, a market research firm, said that Microsoft Office now has 93 percent of the world market for the collections of business software known as suites. The other 7 percent is divided between two other suites built around former industry heavyweights. Lotus SmartSuite has 4 percent of the market, and Corel WordPerfect Suite has 3 percent.
The problem with the theory behind the DOJ's case, as well as Thure's comments is just that - they are theory, and totally ignore the reality of the situation. Here are several explicit cases of where an underdog in productivy apps captured majority share by mitigating the risks of conversion via technical utilities and lower prices. These examples do not include majority market shareholder Harvard Graphics ignomious defeat by PowerPoint, Defacto standard Ashton-Tate's dbase by Access, among others. Now, as apps become more complex (a tactical measure on the part of MSFT to not only offer more productivity but to also make it more difficult to offer conversion utilities and lower costs) such as the intorduction of Visual Basic for Applications custom coding, switching costs become higher. Thus, the price of a higher level of technology. It is the higher level of sophistication that MSFT has introduced to the suite that makes it more difficult to switch back to Lotus after swithcing to Excel, for instance the 10,000 ines of code and formula in my app would be a nightmare to recode in Lotus script, assuming it could be done. Despite this fact, it is still quite possible for another vendor to market a competing app on from a technical perspective. VBA is freely licensed to third parties who are actually encouraged to integrate it into thier apps, thereby eliinating the need to recode much of MSFT's end users proprietary technology. Excel and Word files are read and written accurately by many third party applcations. Specialty add-in libraries are available for several products.
<Reginald has no idea of what he is talking about. Try to convert back to Lotus 123 and use it along with your PowerPoint and Word (not to speak of your e-mail, databases, and so on). Then imagine 1000's of people having to do the same thing. Just because Reginald says something doesn't make it so.>
I have no problem converting files to Lotus. Logic dictates that if you were to convert your spreadsheet to Lotus, you would convert your entire suite to Lotus, hence the PowerPoint and Word example is unrealistic. |
