A little off topic but have you been in a Staples lately? I feel like I'm looking at the next zombie retailer with the lifespan of a gnat.
The place is reeks of a bygone era of Computer Citys, CompUSAs and Futureshops. I don't see how they stay in business for that much longer. Everything they sell is a commodity that can be gotten online for cheaper, their stores are in disarray, demo units broken or disabled. The number of employees walking around in the store typically outnumber the customers. The only time I've gone in there is to look at something physically before purchasing it online, or to buy something very very small (like markers).
I just don't know how or why a company like this is still in business, they must've stored up some cash in the past or get their money some other way.
Funny enough, I actually have been. One thing I found quite odd: their computer prices were quite good. They didn't seem as jacked up as some other retailers. Maybe that's why they are still chugging.
Sure, 10, even 15 years ago you could run excel and word on 486s and early pentiums but those were very different beasts compared to the modern versions of the software. Since then the scripting system has changed, and you can't neglect the importance of COM based embedded sub-documents.
Mostly though the problem is that if you want/need Office on your tablet it's so you can access all your corporation's Office documents, and the important ones are invariably fricking huge. Because the person creating the document is sat on a big grown up PC they will happily slap it full of embedded graphics, excel charts and whatnot - resulting in a huge memory footprint. That's before you even get into the corporate spreadsheets that are pure bloat - or the horror of an old document that has the amendment tracking thingy turned on.
I've worked in plenty of places that are heavily tied into Excel as I work in finance, and none of them could plausibly port their excel based solutions onto a tablet that had less than the power of a modern laptop - the few places that could do it are the ones that already switched from excel to web-based tools.
As to whether MS is already preparing such thin-client offerings, I've yet to see any indication that this is their vision of cloud computing. Instead they go more for either web based documents, which don't provide full office, or they go for full virtualization - at which point your tablet is just a dumb terminal onto a full blown windows box somewhere else. One way or another it's going to be clunky.
You can't ever count MS out because they're willing to keep pouring money into these things for years, but at this point there's little reason to suspect a huge windows 8 tablet market, even in the enterprise.
It really is amazing how MS Office has dominated modern business. Sure, there's Oracle and SAP but the go to is Word and Excel for everything. Literally. I reckon 20% (some would say more) of MS Office use could be just sent as a plain text email. PowerPoint is de facto. Hideously so.
In fact, this is why the iPad is so successful in penetrating large corporations especially at executive levels. An exec where I'm on a short contract one day was "hiding out" in a meeting room on a different floor with just his iPad. He said he got more work done that day. Just focusing on emails, calendar, web browsing and PDF and Office document viewing. That and he wasn't being continuously interrupted in his regular office. And when you're on the go, nobody would want to lug their laptop around, just an iPad could suffice if you're not a heavy Office document *editor* or *creator*.
We really are looking at a situation where just like PCs "took over" mainframes, iPad will "take over" PCs in time. The sticking point is Office. But increasingly more and more stuff will be done through web interfaces, stock apps and custom apps. The other thing favouring the iPad is the decentralisation of IT and just how ridiculously bogged down work PC laptops become, once all the "work-related" gunk is installed. Sometimes you just need to grab your iPad and focus on specific tasks rather than fighting with your bloated, laggy, grinding laptop.
I think there's still huge scope for companies to move away from Office for every single task. There's huge Market opportunity still, I reckon, if you can target a range of business functions and most importantly enabling companies to easily use such software without having to go through lengthy systems analysis and systems integration. And it has to be cheaper than the "big boy" enterprise software (though that will still be needed).
Comments
A little off topic but have you been in a Staples lately? I feel like I'm looking at the next zombie retailer with the lifespan of a gnat.
The place is reeks of a bygone era of Computer Citys, CompUSAs and Futureshops. I don't see how they stay in business for that much longer. Everything they sell is a commodity that can be gotten online for cheaper, their stores are in disarray, demo units broken or disabled. The number of employees walking around in the store typically outnumber the customers. The only time I've gone in there is to look at something physically before purchasing it online, or to buy something very very small (like markers).
I just don't know how or why a company like this is still in business, they must've stored up some cash in the past or get their money some other way.
Funny enough, I actually have been. One thing I found quite odd: their computer prices were quite good. They didn't seem as jacked up as some other retailers. Maybe that's why they are still chugging.
Sure, 10, even 15 years ago you could run excel and word on 486s and early pentiums but those were very different beasts compared to the modern versions of the software. Since then the scripting system has changed, and you can't neglect the importance of COM based embedded sub-documents.
Mostly though the problem is that if you want/need Office on your tablet it's so you can access all your corporation's Office documents, and the important ones are invariably fricking huge. Because the person creating the document is sat on a big grown up PC they will happily slap it full of embedded graphics, excel charts and whatnot - resulting in a huge memory footprint. That's before you even get into the corporate spreadsheets that are pure bloat - or the horror of an old document that has the amendment tracking thingy turned on.
I've worked in plenty of places that are heavily tied into Excel as I work in finance, and none of them could plausibly port their excel based solutions onto a tablet that had less than the power of a modern laptop - the few places that could do it are the ones that already switched from excel to web-based tools.
As to whether MS is already preparing such thin-client offerings, I've yet to see any indication that this is their vision of cloud computing. Instead they go more for either web based documents, which don't provide full office, or they go for full virtualization - at which point your tablet is just a dumb terminal onto a full blown windows box somewhere else. One way or another it's going to be clunky.
You can't ever count MS out because they're willing to keep pouring money into these things for years, but at this point there's little reason to suspect a huge windows 8 tablet market, even in the enterprise.
It really is amazing how MS Office has dominated modern business. Sure, there's Oracle and SAP but the go to is Word and Excel for everything. Literally. I reckon 20% (some would say more) of MS Office use could be just sent as a plain text email. PowerPoint is de facto. Hideously so.
In fact, this is why the iPad is so successful in penetrating large corporations especially at executive levels. An exec where I'm on a short contract one day was "hiding out" in a meeting room on a different floor with just his iPad. He said he got more work done that day. Just focusing on emails, calendar, web browsing and PDF and Office document viewing. That and he wasn't being continuously interrupted in his regular office. And when you're on the go, nobody would want to lug their laptop around, just an iPad could suffice if you're not a heavy Office document *editor* or *creator*.
We really are looking at a situation where just like PCs "took over" mainframes, iPad will "take over" PCs in time. The sticking point is Office. But increasingly more and more stuff will be done through web interfaces, stock apps and custom apps. The other thing favouring the iPad is the decentralisation of IT and just how ridiculously bogged down work PC laptops become, once all the "work-related" gunk is installed. Sometimes you just need to grab your iPad and focus on specific tasks rather than fighting with your bloated, laggy, grinding laptop.
I think there's still huge scope for companies to move away from Office for every single task. There's huge Market opportunity still, I reckon, if you can target a range of business functions and most importantly enabling companies to easily use such software without having to go through lengthy systems analysis and systems integration. And it has to be cheaper than the "big boy" enterprise software (though that will still be needed).