Will Alternatives to Microsoft Become Mainstream? (continued)
Not everyone agrees with McNabb. Vaughan Woods, CEO of Maverick Asia Pte Ltd, a boutique consultancy out of Singapore, sees one solid reason, at least, to consider the contenders' claims. "The reason enterprises look at these products is the high cost of Microsoft."
A Different Lever
While cost is always a factor in any enterprise decision, it still isn't providing the momentum for change one might expect. This forces the alternative applications to take a different approach to encourage wide scale adoption.
"Adoption happens outside of work," says McNabb. "Google and Yahoo in particular are wooing home adopters, hoping to become so familiar and useful that employees will push the enterprise to adopt the programs as well. That strategy does have legs. After all, that's exactly how Microsoft, particularly Windows, pushed its way into the enterprise."
Microsoft did indeed slide in the back door to invade all of the enterprise space but that pervasiveness brought much-needed standardization as well. The threat of the chaos implicit in non-standardized applications has strengthened the ties to the Microsoft mother ship.
"If you review the process of convergence with the MS Office de facto standard in the 1980s, you will get a template for this process," says David McNab, president of Objective Business Services, a boutique consulting firm based in Markham, Ontario. "Office productivity was only realized once we could share information across desktops and networks, and to do that we needed a standard which led to Microsoft's dominance. The next step in evolution is that the Office standards become commoditized -- e.g., open source alternatives abound -- and that's what you are starting to see now."(article continues)
<< Previous Page
Next Page >>
