Will Alternatives to Microsoft Become Mainstream?
By Pam Baker
Is the Microsoft monolith beginning to crumble? Alternative applications for everyday office tasks like word processing, e-mail, spreadsheets and presentations have been available for years, but their small size and limited resources relegated them to the sidelines.
Now, however, the software giant is facing challenges from champions of similar size. "IBM and Google have begun to play together," says Kyle McNabb, principal analyst at Forrester in Cambridge, Mass. "If they can work past their differences, then you have something credible and Microsoft should start shaking in its boots."
Sneaking in the Back Door
IBM, Sun, Google, Yahoo and Thinkfree are the leading contenders jostling to gain a substantial foothold on Microsoft's turf in the enterprise space. Although their potential is promising, at the moment, their plays are tenuous at best.
"We've talked to over 200 enterprises in the last 18 months and we're seeing a lot of playing around with these alternatives -- usually in IT groups and rogues throughout the enterprise that typically use them without corporate sanctions --but we're not seeing very much actual adoption," adds McNabb. "Where we are seeing adoption in enterprise, it's usually of Sun's StarOffice."(article continues)
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