Success breeds Success

Michael Gartenberg | April 30, 2004, 09:21 AM

David Coursey has some interesting thoughts on his weblog about why alternatives to MS Office elude success. We're working on a report covering that at the moment and we should have some interesting data and analysis to share shortly. In the interim, I think David misses a fundamental point about the lack of Outlook and that applies to other apps. Namely, success breeds success. This is one of the core strategies that Microsoft employs to drive efforts forward and if you don't understand the implication of that, you don't understand how Microsoft competes nor can you compete against them well. Outlook alone isn't the issue. It's all the other stuff. My Palm syncs with Outlook. So does my PocketPC and Smartphone. Then there's other stuff. Newsgator, for instance. One reason I don't use my Macintosh more is that there's no Outlook (although there is Entourage and a perfectly great mail app that's even better than Outlook) and if there's no Outlook, there's no Newsgator integration. Newsgator is a critical app for me these days. Likewise, with other Office apps, there's a synergy with other products and other users that's hard to overcome. There are better alternatives to different MS products, perhaps even better things than Windows. But there's an integrated perspective where all the parts come together and create a positive feedback loop. That's what's hard to break and that's one of the reasons why Microsoft's competitors in the space fail.