Office Productivity: Microsoft Continues to Dominate Office Productivity Software

Microsoft Office has proved to be a gold mine to Microsoft during its multi-decade reign as the the most widely used business software productivity suite.  Despite many attempts over the years to one-up and overthrow Microsoft’s dominance, no company or product as of yet has had much success.

The latest contenders are on-line applications from companies like Google and Zoho.  Zoho boast over 4 million users, and Google docs does have quite a few customers, and some are large organizations like Genetech and the City of Los Angeles.  But, by and large, on-line productivity suites haven’t had that much affect on Microsoft’s monopoly on the market.   Over the last two years, Microsoft has continued to hold onto roughly an 80 percent market share for this market.  Interestingly, 74 percent of organizations continue to support versions of Office 2003 and earlier.  Google Docs has an 8 percent market share, and Zoho Docs comes in around 1 percent.  That’s the result of a report by Matthew Brown and Phillip Karcher of the Content and Collaboration at Forrester Research.

The reason why Microsoft remains dominant simply is that they have the most mature and fully featured product.  68 percent of organizations said that they have selected Microsoft because their Office Suite makes their workers most productive.  While other products may be cheaper and may lessen reliance on Microsoft as a vendor, those reasons for favoring an alternative product are much less important when compared to measuring how productive software can make employees.

Clearly the results of the Forrester survey comes as welcome news to Microsoft, but that’s not to say that Microsoft is not worried.  Google has gone from 0 to 8 percent market share in a short period, and they have garnered significant press and hype.  Microsoft is taking the competition seriously and is now beginning to compete strongly in the online world too with it’s newly announced on-line Office365 solution.

As many as 44 percent of IT departments say they are interested in on-line alternatives to Microsoft Office, yet after these company evaluate what’s currently available, only 3 percent choose online options.  The main problem is that while Google Docs, Zoho and are interesting and well-implemented products, they currently can’t match the features, functionality and performance of Microsoft’s desktop applications.