For many years, Microsoft and Office were 100% associated with PC. Not any more. If you follow earlier news from today, Microsoft announced of the biggest releases for a long time – Office 2013. Long awaited release brings lots of new stuff in the Microsoft Office eco-system. Navigate here to read more from Business Insider Live blog post. The following picture is a very good one slide summary of what Office 2013 is about.
So, cloud is one of them. And it seems to me a very important one. Microsoft is going in a very sophisticated way to introduce the cloud to the masses via the hybrid Office 2013 approach that took roots first in Office 365 – PLM Excels and Microsoft Cloud Office 365. My assessment one year back that vendors need to start thinking about what will happen in the day Office will run seamlessly between cloud and PC. Here, the day just came. Here is a passage from the previous post – by default Office App store documents in the cloud, but you can save them locally.
The official statement Microsoft is taking about the cloud and PC combination. Navigate to the following post to read more – What Office 2013 will mean for your business. The following passage makes it clear
Microsoft has been saying for years that Office isn’t just the familiar desktop applications; it’s a family of applications plus servers that enable extra features in the applications, so running Office on the desktop without the Office servers means you miss out. Get Office 2013 through Office 365 and you get the servers as well. Unless you chose the Office 365 Home Premium plan – which is intended for consumers and comes with 20GB of document storage on SkyDrive – buying an Office 365 subscriptions to Office 2013 also get you Office 365 accounts with the Exchange, SharePoint and Lync services.
What is my conclusion? Microsoft Office is a dominant part of many PLM implementations. Excel is the most widely adopted PLM technology. Maybe the last statement is a joke, but only “half joke”, in my view. Microsoft is steering the wheel towards cloud and services. It will work in favor of PLM vendors pushing toward the cloud as an opportunity – Autodesk PLM 360, Arena Solutions, Dassault and Aras. It will be interesting to see the reaction of other PLM market players. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
