Alongside platforms and ubiquitous web apps, Ballmer views Office Business Applications as one of Microsoft’s top software growth markets. It leverages tools like SharePoint Portal, and the upgrading of Microsoft’s Office System to a more enterprise-grade development platform.
Ballmer described Office Business applications as filling the gap between the personal productivity that are ubiquitous on enterprise desktops, and the line of business applications that are the bread and butter of most of software vendors who were in the audience. The pieces that fall between office and the line of business applications are the things that people really get excited over, he said, citing the example of a BI (business intelligence) add-on that sliced and diced profitability and presented it on Excel charts and spreadsheets.
Using Duet, the joint offering with SAP that presents selected MySAP processes through Office, Ballmer claimed that integration is the holy grail for most business software providers, even those who see Microsoft as their rival. Even with Marc’s high rhetoric, he still wants to ensure that Salesforce.com can work thru Microsoft Office, said Ballmer, referring to Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s head who can rival Ballmer in promotional decibels.
They key to Ballmer’s pitch is that, with Office 2007, Microsoft has added a robust development environment that goes beyond the old Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a relatively lightweight language that primarily focused on front end integration.
Ever since Office 2003, Microsoft has begun promoting The Office System, making Office m ore extensible and providing more hooks for third party applications. But it largely relied on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which was largely a widget factory for developing integration at the user interface level.
But with Office 2007, Microsoft has developed more industrial strength tooling for .NET software developers, new data-driven file formats, and has coupled it with advances in the Vista platform that unify software and front end design. They include Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Microsoft Office System 2007, which provides a full .NET-compliant development platform for Office; OfficeXML, which allows Office documents to be saved as XML files; and features of the WinFX programming environment of Vista, which include XAML for user interface design, and Windows Presentation Foundation for rich look and feel.
In essence, these new features provide a route for other third parties to tie in with Office using off the shelf technologies, instead of requiring special efforts from Microsoft’s to design customized menu bars or windowpanes to Office applications for specific SAP processes that were required for Duet.
And Microsoft is eager to promote one of its strengths, which is its extensive background in creating third party software partner ecosystems, to the conference audience, much of whom come from software startups.
Ballmer then introduced Dassault Systemes, which developments product lifecycle management (PLM) systems for engineering teams, to show how use of the The Office System 2007 expanded the audience for its tools. A repair report was prepared that not only logged the incident, but also integrated Dassault’s 3-D CAD engineering model that showed managers and maintenance crew exactly which part was at fault.
After the talk, Ballmer was questioned about Microsoft’s business strategies. He was asked if the release of Office and Windows Live SaaS offering meant the end of traditional, monolithic multi-year development, Ballmer responded that Microsoft would continue its current strategy. If anybody thinks that is only innovations done in short timeframes are worth doing is wrong. He said that Microsoft would offer a mix of short and long product development cycles.
He was also asked whether Microsoft would ever settle for being runner up in a market. I don’t think any company should do anything without aspiring to be number one, but added that former GE head Jack Welch’s strategy for selling units that weren’t first or second in their markets was short-sighted.
Even Jack at the end of his career admitted that GE missed some opportunities through that strategy, Ballmer said, adding, We have a lot of patience. Sometimes we get it right from the get go and sometimes not. But we will keep coming and coming and coming.
When asked about Microsoft’s tendency to buy niche firms, Ballmer said that it would likely continue to be Microsoft’s main M&A strategy. By default we have not opted for large acquisitions, but we have not ruled it out either, he said.
