Robert Scoble:

I’d love to know what you think? Does any of the Office 2.0 vendors have a chance to edge in on Microsoft’s market?

Edge in – sure, it’s been happening for at least the past 5 years or more. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve sold EditLive! to companies who were replacing Word to make life more pleasant for users. Notably though, these aren’t situations in Word’s core target market – creating documents destined for print. Word has picked up a lot of market share in all kinds of weird and wonderful content creation scenarios that it wasn’t designed for and it’s picked up features to make it work quite well there. Despite that, these fringe areas are ripe for competitors to specialize in and provide solutions that fit better with the user’s intentions.

Interestingly, Word is usually the first choice when implementing or developing a new solution because people want a front end that users are already familiar with. The trouble is, they are using Word in a new situation so they often wind up frustrated. Usually it’s with things outside of Words control like checking documents in and out of the content management system or custom integrations with the back end systems and repositories. In the end though, users start demanding a better editor that fits with what they’re trying to do better. That’s when alternatives get a look in.

The other major, and often underrated, advantage that many alternatives to Word have is ease of deployment. Java really shines in this area – I’ve spoken to a number of very large clients that report massive failure rates for getting even the simplest stand alone application deployed, but can roll out our applet seamlessly without problems. The ability to deploy stand alone apps via WebStart is a huge win for a lot of enterprises too – users just click a link on a web page and the application starts. DHTML solutions that run cross-browser seamlessly also benefit from this, though a lot require browser upgrades or changes which causes major headaches.

Interestingly, Office itself doesn’t tend to suffer from a deployment problem because it’s already deployed everywhere – it’s the add-ons, plugins and other integrations that enhance Word to work with the back end repositories that are too difficult to deploy and cause problems. It’s no use having Word pre-installed if you can’t also deploy the plugins that your system needs.

What you are unlikely to see is organizations moving to not installing Office at all and instead using Web 2.0 technologies. You might see them go to OpenOffice or similar alternatives though it’s not going to be a big trend, but you just can’t beat the productivity of a stand alone app for random desktop publishing tasks. As soon as content management systems come into play though, browser based solutions have been chewing into Office’s market for a long time.