There’s a report out saying that Cisco Systems, the guys consumers probably know best as the makers of Linksys networking products, are considering stepping into the productivity software fray. They wouldn’t start selling discs (who does that anymore?), but would instead make their software available online a la Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword.
Corporations, the biggest entities which consume software, fork over a lot of money each year to Microsoft for its Office suite of applications, so all these companies who’re getting into the fray are hoping to steal some of that $60 billion pie. Of course, that requires two things. The first is that Cisco needs to get companies to trust that, not only would their servers not go down ever so that businesses could have access to their time-sensitive materials when they need it, but that the servers would be well protected. Google Docs had a bug earlier this year that marked 0.05% of documents saved on its servers public, which is just not an acceptable error for businesses.
The other thing that Cisco would have to do is make sure to build good applications. One of the reasons why people fork over money to Microsoft is that alternatives are not as robust. Buzzword, as stated before, is pretty well put together, but it’s only a word processing application. Cisco would have to put together a spreadsheet program and something for presentations a la Powerpoint, and that’s just for starters.
Announcing plans to take on Microsoft, speculative or otherwise, had best be backed up with some real substance. You have to have good programs and good security, and that’s to not even mention browser compatibility. Adobe has yet to make Buzzword compatible with Firefox 3.5, the latest build of the web browser. A company can’t rely on software that breaks every time the browser is updated.
