Will Office 365 change Microsoft’s position in mobile?
http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/software-technology/10338.html
One of Microsoft’s goals with Office 365, its new cloud-based office productivity suite, is to strengthen the company’s position in mobile, but it remains to be seen if the offer is compelling enough to attract new customers.
We’re thrilled Moprise was mentioned in this article. But it also raises an interesting question - can Microsoft’s newest enterprise infrastructure drive adoption of Microsoft’s newest mobile devices?
Microsoft has a very focused “better together” strategy. The “Office suite” was the first example of a set of productivity applications - Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook - working well together. Microsoft extended this with the Windows client, Office Suite, Windows Server, and even Windows Mobile/Phone. Customers were well served with leading edge PC technology by picking Microsoft as the default vendor. Things worked well together for users, IT was more consistent, and Microsoft even made licensing complementary technologies easier by checking a box at renewal time.
However, the mobile disruption is huge. iPad, iPhone, and Android are leading this mobile revolution with mobile apps delivering new consumer scenarios with around entertainment, games, augmented reality, and location awareness. Many of these scenarios were unimaginable on PCs. Now these devices are flooding into the enterprise despite having significant friction points with enterprise infrastructure. In the near term, 3rd parties offer mobile apps that work with Microsoft Office formats, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, or even remote into desktop PCs. But these are gap-fillers much like the first personal computers supported terminal emulators to connect to mainframes.
As phones & tablets increase in capability and versatility, we will re-imagine enterprise productivity with a mobile first perspective. At first, these will be bite sized moments of productivity. Face scanning a crowd and getting lead & customer contact info on your phone in real time will be more valuable than desktop Outlook/CRM integration. Real time push notifications of updates to documents, contracts, or sales closure will deliver more context and be immediately actionable instead of today’s email centric notifications that require filtering, multiple clicks, and browser login before action can be taken. Background delivery of important documents and easy response mechanisms instead of VPN, browser login, download, view, switch to email & respond. Real time team scheduling instead of high latency scheduling via email, SMS, and phone tag.
As we look forward, we believe mobility will change the way we work. This will drive changes into IT infrastructure in a significant fashion. Quite the opposite of Microsoft’s hope that IT infrastructure will change what mobile device we use.
