"Pocket" Office: Why We May Never See a Full-featured Pocket Word25 March 2002 Don't get me wrong, I like Pocket Word. Pocket Office's general interoperability with the desktop version of Office without necessary conversions is one of the things that attracted me to the Pocket PC. And that might be the problem. As much as I love my Pocket PC, I'm starting to wonder about Microsoft. I heard some speculation recently that got me thinking about why the Pocket Office apps are missing some of the core features that PalmOS apps like Documents To Go and WordSmith provide, and I don't like where that train of thought is taking me. Part of my thinking has to do with a book I'm reading -- World War 3.0 -- about the antitrust suit against Microsoft, and how and why Netscape was the linchpin of the government's case. According to the Justice Department, Microsoft has a monopoly in the PC operating system market, and that monopoly not only builds on itself, but it's key in selling other Microsoft products from server software to office suites. The core concept is called the "applications barrier to entry," and it works like this.
Despite OS/2's old slogan of "Operate at a higher level," no one buys an operating system to stare at the desktop. They buy an operating system because they have an app they want to use that only runs on that OS. Thus the application barrier to entry ensures that Microsoft sells lots of copies of Windows, which in turn ensures that users will buy other Microsoft products that require Windows. The more products Microsoft sells -- games, office suites, server software -- the more demand for the Windows operating system. It's a self-maintaining cycle. With me so far? So far, Microsoft hasn't done anything illegal. Establishing a monopoly isn't against the law in the United States. What is against the law is using your monopoly to leverage your way into new markets, or to use it as a club to kill potential competition. This is exactly what the government alleges Microsoft did in the mid to late 90s against Netscape. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and provided it for download for free in order to wrest market share away from Netscape Communicator. But why?It's just a web browser, right? That's not the way Microsoft saw it, goes the government's story. Microsoft saw the combination of Netscape and Sun's Java language which Netscape carried as a potential threat to Windows itself. Back in the mid-90s, the idea of writing full-blown applications in Java that would run in a web browser on any platform was a trendy concept, and it got a lot of press. The idea was that developers could ditch the Windows API and write to the Java/Netscape API instead. Their applications would still run on Windows machines, giving them the same market potential they would have had writing for Windows, but they'd be able to run on Unix, OS/2, Macintosh and other platforms as well. This "middleware threat," as it came to be known, was a challenge that could have commoditized Windows by making the operating system underneath the browser irrelevant. If that happened, the key to virtually all of Microsoft's revenue went right down the tubes. In essence, the strategic importance to Microsoft of Internet Explorer had nothing to do with the Internet, but instead using Internet Explorer to protect Windows itself. Whether or not Microsoft does in fact have a legal monopoly is still open for debate, and the antitrust case still isn't really over. But regardless of how the remedy phase turns out, Microsoft's alleged behavior in regards to Netscape, using one product to bolster another, got me thinking about the Pocket PC. The following is just speculation, and I have no idea how much, if any, of it is true. But it's interesting food for thought. I saw an unconfirmed statement the other day from a Microsoft executive that said that the Pocket PC didn't have to make money itself -- quite unlike Palm -- because it was really only there to promote and support Microsoft Office on the desktop. Basically, Microsoft sees the Pocket PC as a way to extend Office away from the desk, rather than a platform unto itself. This is an interesting statement. The Pocket PC is in an odd and precarious political situation inside Microsoft. Imagine a line with a simple but extensible organizer -- like a Palm -- on one end and a full XP-based Tablet PC on the other. The Pocket PC lies somewhere on the middle of this line, but it can't get too close to either end. Get too simple and "organizer-like", and they lose the competitive advantage over PalmOS-based devices. However, if they get too close to the Tablet PC, they threaten to cannibalize not only Tablet PC sales (meaning fewer Windows XP license sales for Microsoft, a bigger ticket item than Windows CE), but sales of Microsoft Office as well. Let's look at this more closely. If the Pocket PC is meant as way to extend and ensure Microsoft Office, what would that mean? Pocket Office comes with every Pocket PC sold, and you can create new documents on the device. But it's also obviously meant to synchronize with the full (and expensive) Microsoft Office on the desktop. The way it stands now, you need the desktop apps to do things like add tables, clean up styles and formatting, even print. Now for the speculation.What if the "limited" nature of the Pocket Office apps is deliberate, an effort to keep Pocket PC users "tethered" to desktop Windows and Microsoft Office? If that's the case, it would be counter to Microsoft's strategy to improve the Pocket Office applications too much. Microsoft needs them to be powerful enough to get useful work done, but not powerful enough to effectively compete with their desktop counterparts. If Microsoft were to add styles, tables, annotations, footnotes, headers and footers, etc. to Pocket Word, why would I have to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for my laptop? If I'm right about this -- and I hope I'm wrong -- then we won't ever see really full-featured versions of the Pocket Office apps. That's not where the money is for Microsoft. But could that be where the money is for someone else? If Microsoft really has no intention of providing anything more than "Office Lite", what's to stop one of the PalmOS office suite vendors from porting their products to the Pocket PC and exploiting a market niche Microsoft has no intention of filling? Many software companies are hesitant to "compete" with Microsoft by writing software that Microsoft can make irrelevant by improving their own stuff, but this is different. If someone were to offer a full-featured office suite for the Pocket PC (or heck, just a full-featured word processor), Microsoft couldn't do anything about it. Why? Because if they did, they would be defeating their very own aims in regards to Microsoft Office. They may accept a third party application that users have to seek out, purchase and install manually competing with Office XP, but they're not going to put their own version in the ROM of every Pocket PC. So what about it? Blue Nomad, iambic, Cutting Edge, DataViz, I'm talking to you. If Microsoft won't step up to the plate and make a full-featured office suite for the Pocket PC, who will? |