Ars Technica has an interesting piece that they've just posted that touches on the way that Microsoft Word (amongst other Microsoft titles, in my own opinion) has become more of a 'way things have always been done' than a 'this is the best way' kind of tool. The article makes some comparisons between Microsoft Office and the free alternative from Sun Microsystems, Open Office. Yet there are many other alternatives out there beyond the two mentioned in that article.
For instance, Google has Google Docs which does simple word processing very well and costs nothing to use. Apple has their own office suite called iWork which costs $79 when purchased directly from Apple, and its MS Word competitor simply titled "Pages" is very intuitive and produces some very nice looking documents suited for printing, emailing, posting on web pages, you name it.
So let's review. Microsoft Word costs more ($100 according to microsoft.com), is generally more difficult to use than its competitors, produces proprietary output (although they are starting to finally incorporate PDF output years after all of their competitors decided to make the move), yet for some reason it is still the most popular product on the market. Why?
Simply put, it's a popular culture thing. Just like "kleenex" is synonymous with "tissue", "Word" is synonymous with "word processor". We've all grown up technologically using Word for our document authoring and for so many years that went without any competition. Now, Microsoft doesn't even really have to make any major improvements to the software or fix any bugs or even make it easier to use in order to keep customers. They keep customers because they've been engrained into our way of thinking so much that their only competition is one that comes from within. That is, they'd have to try in order to lose the market for office document authoring software. At least that's the way it stands right now. But let's me honest, this is technology we're talking about. Who knows what the future holds?
1 comment:
the technology is really growing but some of us are still behind. i know nothing about softwares, some of things we buy may be expensive but not good enough. For software is different the more expensive it is the more materil the software has, easy to use and has more details compare to the rest.
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