How so, Hal? As far I can see, Communicator contains nothing to compete with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc. Outlook and IE are very, very minor parts of Office 97. I don't think anyone's going to buy Office 97 for these components (which weren't even part of the best-selling Office suite until now) - they buy Office for the desktop productivity applications such as Word and Excel. Customers need these types of applications, and they're not going to get them as part of Communicator (right?).
So won't they have to buy Office regardless of whether they get Communicator or not? And once again, we come back to the point that if they already have this stuff from MSFT, is NSCP's offering so good that people will pay extra for better versions of products they already own?
I think it's worth asking the question that if a company already has licenced Office 3.x or Office 95, is it worth for them to upgrade to Office 97? Maybe not. And maybe in that case, it IS worth it for them to pay $50 for Communicator. But with MSFT and Lotus pricing their competing products aggresively (in some cases, for free), is this market enough for NSCP? Regardless, I don't think it's meaningful to compare Communicator and Office 97 as direct competitors - Office is just so much bigger than Communicator. |
