MattCreamer.com

A big takeout in the business section of the Sunday New York Times chronicles Google’s attempt to take on Microsoft’s software dominance. Having bested Redmond in search, Google is now pushing its suite of web-based office applications that are gaining in popularity, even if they’re still dwarfed by Microsoft. Microsoft remains a safe choice for many businesses, but for consumers, including this one, it’s a different story. I’m a Mac user at home with no desire to pay anything at all for an MS Office package so I use Google Docs, fine for my word-processing needs. Last week, I began to playwith a mobile version of Google Docs that isn’t bad.

All in all, it’s not difficult to avoid Microsoft products when you’re working in a Mac context and, I’ve found, there’s very little lost. And, I’m finding, there’s a lot to be gained by living in the proverbial Google ecosystem, with mail, calendar, the RSS reader, maps, all getting better and better and working together. (Steve Rubel has written very insightfully and usefully about using Gmail as a “personal nerve center.”) Add the mobile version and functions that allow you share different pieces of information–like an item from an RSS feed–and you’ve got the makings of a social network organized wholly around streamlined communications minus the increasingly annoying zombie-biting and movie compatibiility tastes that are mucking up my Facebook newsfeed.  That’s huge.
So, Microsoft has some catch-up to play–strange given its products’ ubiquity. It’s best bet for success is to refocus on product and perhaps not worry so much about capturing users in a snare of its products and allowing more give-and-take with competing products. It’s worst play is to treat this as nothing more than a marketing or PR program to be solved by spraying a slick ad campaign all over the airwaves. As I documented a couple weeks ago in Advertising Age, Microsoft is prepping one of those to push all its products. it’s probably not the best idea at this point. People briefed on the campaign say its seed is fear of Google and Apple and the idea is to buy some preference for MS products that are in the company’s view “taken for granted.” Microsoft is right to fear Google and Apple.  Both companies are in different ways brilliant marketers, but, more important, they consistently deliver on product. For Microsoft, product, not marketing, is where the fear should come in.