One of the jobs that Steven Sinofsky had was to go to trade shows and copy best-of-breed software for Microsoft. He excelled at that and rose through the Microsoft ranks.
A big part of Microsofts success is to copy competitors (often badly) and be good enough for IT managers to buy worse-of-breed products in a “best-of-suite” offering.
Just look at how they still fail at edge cases compared to Zoom or how clunky they are compared to Slack. Yet they dominate those categories.
A really interesting example is Dropbox. Steve Jobs famously made them an offer which they refused, and told them what they had was a feature, not a product.
Since then a lot of the major tech companies have rolled out file sync products, arguably not because they particularly want to be in that business, but because they need to be. File sync is just a natural thing we need to be able to do and lots of systems we use need to be able to do it.
Dropbox seem to have carved out a sustainable business as the non-aligned independent that integrates with everyone. Long may that continue.
But IT admins don't buy things because they're independent. The cost of using Microsoft 365 with Onedrive is $0 since it's included in all retail packages, while doing the same for Dropbox is $12.50/user/month (the same per-use price as the M365 plan that includes Office applications). Unless IT is part of a tech-driven company where leadership knows the benefit of investing extra money into IT Ops, the budget doesn't allow for redundant solutions like this.
That’s not really their strategy anymore, it’s not “bundle a bunch of mediocre stuff” but more “Bundle it with Exchange and Outlook”, which is an excellent product. People will buy Exchange, and then the Teams button just magically pops up and they don’t see a good enough reason to go buy Slack unless their employees complain too much.
Calendaring in Outlook is worlds better than anything else I've used, there's a ton of niceties (pick a time, type a name and it automatically tells you that person is unavailable. same with rooms.). Exchange's sync is very good, which is not something I can say for traditional IMAP.
I have my problems with them (like that Outlook is by far the most unstable part of Office, and can't keep the local cache clean for more than a year), but the features that work are way better than anything else on the market. I use Gmail for personal mail (because it comes with my unlimited Google Drive), and I can't do half of the rules and things I can do it Outlook.
> A big part of Microsofts success is to copy competitors (often badly) and be good enough for IT managers to buy worse-of-breed products in a “best-of-suite” offering.
This gets put out a lot but for Microsoft Office, this wasn't the case. By the time Office came out, Microsoft had pretty close to best of breed. By the mid-1990's, Word on its own was at least as good as, if not better than, WordPerfect. Lotus AmiPro was in 3rd place. Also, by the mid-1990's Excel was at the top in terms of spreadsheets.
I think the thing that made them able to succeed was the experience with Excel and Word for Mac. By writing these, they learned a lot of lessons on how best to allow software to take advantage of a GUI. Then when Windows took off, they could apply these lessons that competitors who had mainly focused on their DOS based user interfaces did not learn.
The ability to one-shop the whole office experience helped. So you could deal with microsoft for the OS and word.....etc or Microsoft for os and there for your WP and lots of other companies making support a multi number TZ experience compared to a one-stop shop like Microsoft.
This is also around the era of NT4 becoming mature and oh, did they push around that. I recall getting a crazy deal in which was after NT4 server but they had a bundle that was cheaper and you got the whole Backoffice bundle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BackOffice_Server )
and of course, helped promote their ecosystem even further.
So many alternative offerings just get pushed out, be it price or the cost of marketing to get new sales being a bridge too far. Many carried on in some form for while with their hard-core loyal users from old but even that didn't sustain them.
I recall also IBM buying one of these word alternatives and trying to create their own bundle offering, but alas that and equally the PC market slipped thru their fingers. In part from their half-cocked push on OS/2, which alas never really got the public traction it could of got and often wonder what could of been upon that.
> I think the thing that made them able to succeed was the experience with Excel and Word for Mac. By writing these, they learned a lot of lessons on how best to allow software to take advantage of a GUI. Then when Windows took off, they could apply these lessons that competitors who had mainly focused on their DOS based user interfaces did not learn.
YES the whole GUI aspect really did help Microsoft push their offerings as they worked, but then they did have inside help as they knew what API's would work (and quirks) and how to use them ahead of others. Equally if they wanted something not available, they had the clout to get it added. This along with GUI's add one heck of overhead upon your application development and was a few gotcha's. I do recall having issues using some OCX(iirc) feature that just would bug badly and retorted to logging a ticket with Microsoft for them to come back and say, we have looked into it and yes it is broken, we will fix it in the new version. Which meant upgrading everything and kinda killed that whole project in the end as was a fair few of those.
Whilst it didn't do heavy development with Windows back then, my experiences sure tainted me and I'm sure those deeper in that trench will have some even uglier battle stories. Maybe why finding out undocumented API's back then was more a thing as many instances of you can't do that but there is an undocumented API that will do that and Microsoft product X,y.Z....all use it to add that feature.
Was interesting times and yet, was enough to put me of doing development upon Windows even to this day as just got burned too many times. SO yes, I can see how things may of played out for those wonderful DOS applications transitioning towards GUI land with Windows.
A big part of Microsofts success is to copy competitors (often badly) and be good enough for IT managers to buy worse-of-breed products in a “best-of-suite” offering.
Just look at how they still fail at edge cases compared to Zoom or how clunky they are compared to Slack. Yet they dominate those categories.