Comment by mattmanser
5 days ago
Do you think they'll continue to win in enterprise? As a casual office user, who's had to do some PowerPoint and word docs recently, I found the experience of using office 365 truly miserable. All of them are laggy and horrible to use.
I think by moving onto the cloud they've left themselves open to being disrupted, and when it comes it'll be like Lotus Notes, an extremely quick downfall.
They have enterprise users locked in mainly due to Active Directory, for which there is no good replacement, and to a some extent SharePoint. There's also Office, of course, and you are right that the migration to web tech isn't well taken. I'm thinking of "New Outlook" in particular. They probably plan to EOL classic Outlook when Office 2024 EOLs in 2029. The last stronghold will be Excel. If native Excel ever gets discontinued, then everything Microsoft will have been webshittified™.
Trust me, I really want that to happen, but who has the billions to burn (and the will to use them at that) to build a solid alternative? Most probably, the EU will have a misguided shot at it, out of desperation from the USA, and will subsidise some inadequate local actors. I'm not sure whether it will be good, timely nor sufficient.