A couple of posts in the past day got me interested. Seems some research has been conducted which took 600 random PC users and asked them about their awareness and personal use of online office productivity offerings. The results graph is below;
So it seems the majority of people haven’t heard of the products. So far so good. But then I read a post here that basically says online suites such as Zoho and GApps are no real threat to MS Office. That is about as sensible an inference as saying that Google was no real threat to Alta Vista 8 years ago because people hadn’t heard of it. The entire point of having the term “disruptive technology” is that the stuff disrupts the status quo, making people want to subvert the dominant behaviour of the time.
The other post which got me fired up was this one. Ridiculously the post contended that;
“It took electricity 60 years to move to the cloud model; why should software be any different?”
I’m very nearly left speechless at the short-sightedness of that quote so I’ll let the response come from Zoli who sums it up nicely when he says;
(How can one) even begin to comprehend how a business analyst can equate the rate of technological advancements today to that of the late 1800’s, early 1900’s – and apparently that’s what Guy Creese does. And as for the 30-year prediction… oh, please… where were computers 30 years ago? I don’t want to use cheap tricks like the famous misquote attributed to IBM’s Thomas Watson: ” I think there is a world market for maybe five computers“, but who could have predicted where we are now 30 years ago? Anyone who claims he can see computing trends for the next 30 years is smoking something, IMHO.
