Ask HN: what does Microsoft sell that you can't get for free?

[AlexMuir]

Today I installed ubuntu and have been blown away by it. It actually is easy to use and works very well.

I'm looking at microsoft's product line and there are mature free alternatives to most stuff:

Windows - Linux

Office - open office, google docs

Exchange - gmail

I'd be worried if I was Microsoft. And I know their profit is driven by enterprise, but today's startups are tomorrow's enterprise customers.

[kenjackson]

Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents?

Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some incredible stuff integrating Pivot, Silverlight, and Sharepoint. Sure it's enterprise and not Web 2.0 social web, but its the type of stuff that makes CIO cough up millions of dollars.

We've looked at Open Office and Google Apps in years past and they were literally at MS Office 2000 level. If all you want to do is write a memo, Word, OpenOffice, GoogleDocs, or Notepad will work fine.

When you're in a real enterprise with real enterprise needs, the features in Office that you think no one uses, are a huge win businesses. And once you're using Office, BizTalk and Sharepoint just bring everything together.

And the other tool that only MS has is Visual Studio. Still hands down the best dev environment I've used.

We should be clear. Windows has never been the only OS choice. IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance. And while pundits, who generally aren't in the enterprise, think that world can move away from Office. I think just the opposite. The new features, that aren't of general use to Joe Schmoe, make it more invaluable for the enterprise.

[stoney]

IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance

I completely agree. Excel is the thing that keeps me tied to Windows (and no, the Mac version of Excel isn't the same). It is by far the best software I have used for small to medium complexity data analysis (at some point you have to pull out the really heavy lifting number crunching tools, but they have even less open source competition), and it is the only software I have used that meets most of my needs and is also approachable to relative beginners.

[wrs]

FYI, Google Docs got worse since you looked at it. It's now at about MacWrite (circa 1984) level. Oh, and it broke compatibility with old documents (something Microsoft knows not to do!).

[giblet]

I think the point was that startups, without a million lines of VBA and friends (terrifying), may get hooked on non-MS software because it's free/cheap.

So in X years they'll be rocking their Palo server and a million lines in to OpenOffice Basic (also terrifying), wondering why more people don't use Google Wave v2.

[rohitarondekar]

"And the other tool that only MS has is Visual Studio. Still hands down the best dev environment I've used."

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

[GeneralMaximus]

> Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents?

Could you expand on this? What kind of "workflows" are you building? I can understand programming Excel, but how do you program Word and what do you use it for?

[SecurityMatters]

I don't know about accessing OLAP databases, but it seems like a bad idea, anyway. The programmability of OpenOffice is quite powerful and workflows can and are automated with it.

Visual Studio is not bad for people with little understanding of development. Unfortunately, CS schools turn out many people like that these days. I don't know why people want tools that get in the way and slow you down as much as Visual Studio, but it is popular.

To me, the built in unreliability of Windows is something I wonder why more people don't focus on. Building your business processes around something that needs proprietary tools that can disappear with little notice just seems crazy.

[duck]

Exchange - gmail

I see this comparison so often, but it really is apples and oranges. I love gmail and use it daily, but it isn't a replacement for Exchange. First, gmail is just a client... you have no control over the server aspect with Google. That is fine for a lot of small businesses, but for most mid to large companies that isn't an option.

Does Exchange cost a lot of money? Yes, but with that you get a first class messaging platform that you control.

[carbocation]

For me, Office is the killer. You cannot seamlessly transfer things such as PPTX files from Office 2007 to OpenOffice. This is a critical problem, and is the thing keeping me on Windows. All of the scientists at my institution in my field use Microsoft software for presentations and for some amount of data exchange (the 'high-level', post-processing stuff--the actual data lives in flatfiles or databases). This, unfortunately, keeps me a bit locked in.

I suppose I could just run Wine...

[_delirium]

That used to be the case for me, but around here the Office ecosystem has been increasingly fragmenting between versions--- some departments are all on Windows 7 with Office 2007, but quite a lot of machines are still on XP with Office 2003, and some folks (esp. on laptops) are using the Mac version of Office. The interoperability mess that causes is pushing people away from sending out Office file formats at all (mostly moving towards PDF), and to the extent they do, they choose save-as for some old version of Office rather than sending docx/pptx.

[AlexMuir]

PowerPoint and publisher are the two office apps that seem to be hardest to replace. But they're both ripe for web-based alternatives.

[squidsoup]

One thing I've noticed is that corporate adoption of wikis is slowly chipping away at MS Word's marketshare. There aren't many times when you genuinely need a word processor today.

We still use MS Excel quite a bit - it's a good program.

[Khao]

Personally, I don't think that any OS is even close to being what Windows is. Maybe Macs are the closest and I believe they got a few things down better than Windows, but this alternative isn't free either. As for Linux I have tried different linux OSes and I see only use for them in server environments. None of them have made me want to lose Windows completely because they weren't as plug and play as Windows is.

Another killer point for Microsoft is the whole Visual Studio environment and the .NET language. I haven't found a single IDE that is as powerful as Visual Studio and the language (C# notably, but also any other .net language) is also by far my favorite language. Compared to Java, I know that the language isn't that much different, but because Visual Studio makes it so easy, so plug and play, it gives you the freedom to concentrate only on the code and nothing else. I've had bad experiences where IDEs made from Java for writing Java software are really slow and buggy, and that's not what I've seen so far from software written in .Net either as free or paid softwares.

[squidsoup]

I'm a .Net developer that has recently started working in the Java/GWT/Google Apps ecosystem, and honestly have found Eclipse Helios to be a perfectly good IDE. I can't honestly think of anything that it is missing - it has a unit test runner, "intellisense", easy dependency management etc.

Eclipse also has some neat plugins like eclimd that let you run genuine vim inside the IDE.

[xiongchiamiov]

I'm told that you can do .NET development using Mono quite satisfactorily. No personal experience.

There's a lot of crappy Java programs. This is likely the result of there being a lot of crappy Java programmers.

Personally, programming is why I'm not on Windows; sure, you've got the .NET stack, but we've got everything else. Most languages, editors, debuggers, etc. that I find are either *nix-only, or have Windows support bolted on.

I feel like a religious war is forthcoming.

[rodh257]

Their competitors may have free up front costs, but the purchase price isn't the only cost a business has when they adopt a product.

For startups who are short on cash, these free up front solutions are good because thats what they lack, cash. For big enterprises they aren't going to go with something that costs them heaps in training, customization, has no support etc (not picking on anything in particular) just because there is no up front costs. Also, the Google apps version of Gmail isn't free if you have more than 50 staff.

[sandGorgon]

OpenOffice does not even come close to MS Office .. especially for the Excel part.

The problem is not that XLS(X) is a better or worse format than OOXML. The problem is that it is defacto - so if I want to be able to communicate with the rest of the business world, I need compatibility.

Softmaker comes close, but not good enough. Plus now that OpenOffice's future is tenuous (oracle?), I would rather buy Office or Softmaker.

[koeselitz]

Tiny, pretty unimportant clarification: Microsoft xlsx/docx/etcx files are OOXML. When Microsoft decided to emulate OpenOffice and create a XML-based doc format, they called it "Office Open XML" - or OOXML for short. OpenOffice, on the other hand, uses the XML-based Open Document Format (ODF) for its files by default. Confusing, yes, but there you are.

[melvinram]

"Free" isn't the thing Microsoft should be worried about. If Twitter grows to become 50,000 people in 10 years, they won't select Google Docs because it's free. They'll choose it because it helps them get work done better for an overall lower cost, and that is really what Microsoft should be worried about because their competitive edge in most areas is eroding quickly.

For example, Android isn't going to beat Windows Mobile because it's free. It's going to beat Windows Mobile because it's really a better OS (i.e. it's relatively open, has more apps, improving rapidly, etc.)

[AlexMuir]

I agree that price isn't the issue, but by being free (to con sumers at least) these alternatives are ubiquitous, and therefore widely recognized as better. If they were paid for none of us would have used them, so we couldn't all agree that they are better.

[jhen095]

XBox? I would be keen on any free/open source gaming consoles if anyone has any suggestions..

[AlexMuir]

Good call. And the xbox 360 has proven remarkably immune to modding.

[SomeCallMeTim]

Primarily, I'd say it's application software support on Windows. Games? You get a few working under Wine, sometimes, partly, but they're far more likely to work well under the version of Windows they were tested with. Photo editing? Photoshop, or even Corel PhotoPaint, leave Linux in the dust. Video editing software? Nothing on Linux comes close to Vegas Video in features and usability. 3d Graphics? A slew of high-end solutions on Windows; Blender is nice on Linux, but has an exceedingly steep learning curve. There's a reason the original company went out of business. And as much as I want to like OpenOffice (and I do use it instead of Microsoft Office), it's too clunky compared to Office for me to recommend to non-geeks in good faith.

And, for developers, there's a market to sell applications to. When's the last time you saw someone making a living selling software to Linux consumers? (Web based products are an important exception to this rule, of course, but not everything can work well from a browser.) And as a bonus developers get to use the best IDE available anywhere.

These are just the needs I've had, for which I've actively looked for software on Linux to fill. Every single time the software available has been pathetic compared to the professional offering.

It's hard work getting that final level of polish on a piece of software that brings it from "it kinda works" to "it works really well." That's what's typically missing from open source apps: The push to make something really easy to use and solid. Frankly not enough professional applications reach that stage, but the ones I mention above all do.

Firefox is one of the few apps in the open source community to really reach that level of polish. Google Chrome is another. Thunderbird is another. There are a dozen other free programs I use, but none of them really feels polished -- they're good enough to get the job done, but only just. And if more things happen "in the cloud," that may be all people need in the future.

But until "the cloud" is brought to my house on fiber at gigabit speeds, I'd like to keep doing my video editing on a local system, thank you. And until it's less expensive to get a WiMax or 4G or whatever-new-technology wireless connection, I'd like the computing to stay in my laptop as well.

[squidsoup]

I would have said photo editing too, but I've been watching my wife use Photobucket's web based image editor and surprised at how content she seems with it. I've used Photoshop so long that using any other 2d graphic app feels awkward, but the coming "web generation" might feel more comfortable using HTML 5 apps in the future.

[dagw]

I'm sorry, but saying that Blender is the only 3D app for Linux is simply incorrect. Maya, XSI and Houdini plus several other professional 3D apps all run on Linux.

[patio11]

A desktop OS my mother can use. Sorry Ubuntu. You've sudo apt-got my-heart but, well, reality isn't coextensive with our aspirations.

[AlexMuir]

This was what I thought until I installed ubuntu. Maybe it's the honeymoon period, but it just works. I doubt your mum is doing heavy graphics work or playing games and those are the only two things that are keeping me on win 7. The interface ubuntu is nice, it's stable and programs can be installed in one click.

I'm not saying its perfect, just that it's much, much better than I thought.

[steveklabnik]

The plural of anecdote is not data, but my parents have been on Ubuntu for two years now, and they've called me for help one time during, when they bought a new printer.

They migrated from the Mac, actually, so it was just "here's the new Firefox icon, have at it." and they were good to go.

[oomkiller]

My grandfather uses Ubuntu daily on his old Dell. He uses it to check emails, surf the web, and play hearts on Yahoo. Works quite well, and I don't have to worry about viruses or malware. Before Ubuntu, he had an old P3 600Mhz machine and I ran Xubuntu on it, and it was still fairly easy to use.

[code_duck]

My mother DOES use Ubuntu, and I've been called about problems 20% less in the past two years compared to previously, with her using Window XP. There's nothing difficult about it - her browser, email, camera and everything work fine. The interface is actually much more simple than Windows. What's the problem?

[duncan_bayne]

That's not been true in my experience. My parents found Ubuntu easier to use, especially w.r.t. installing software (Synaptic vs. a-different-process-for-every-app).

[blehn]

I've been thinking about setting my mom up with Jolicloud (http://www.jolicloud.com/), which I believe is based on Ubuntu.

She has an HP netbook with an 8GB SSD, and WinXP gives her "running out of space" warnings all the time. She doesn't download anything, but her pagefile.sys file quickly grew to 2GB. After limiting the size of the pagefile, clearing a bunch of other temp files, and uninstalling everything I could, the problem came back within a few months. I think it's an indication of the collective ignorance of Microsoft and PC manufacturers that they would sell a "netbook" that can't reliably browse the web.

[squidsoup]

My step daughter is studying law and history, and has run Ubuntu on her laptop for the last 3 years. She's not particularly technical, but she loves it and has even converted some fellow law students from what I've heard. I showed her how to use LyX (a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor) and many of her professors have commented on how professional her papers look :)

[huntero]

I couldn't agree more. I recently started using Fedora and often had to dive into the depths of Linux to get simple things done/working.

This is going to be unpopular, but the majority of open-source software is not near the polish needed for the non-tech public to use.

[jsz0]

The biggest thing Microsoft provides is ease of management in large environments. If you're dealing with thousands of computers in different departments/locations with different administrative/technical requirements nothing beats a managed Windows environment. There are other things which may not be as clear cut such as security, support, legacy support, software ecosystem, etc.

[_b8r0]

Being a tech driven outfit, we have people that like Macs, like *BSD, like Windows (except Vista, we all hated Vista) and even tinkerers with fringe OSes.

We tried Ubuntu in the workplace for admin staff at the same time as Vista. They preferred Ubuntu to Vista, but really wanted XP.

Because of the mixed environment (and the problems with running mixed Office 2003/7) we moved to OpenOffice. Most people are comfortable with it to a lesser or greater degree, generally those not running Windows do better, but it allows us to do things that we could never do in a sole Windows environment. We keep an Office 2007 licence around in case anyone needs to use .docx etc.

Having said that we're looking at Office 2010 as the split office environment compatibility issues no longer apply and it does look light years ahead of Go-OO.

Google docs is fine for real time collaboration, but Google Talk is essential.

I'd also take business Gmail over Exchange any day. Calendars, Gtalk, Docs, everything. It's just so much better. For us, privacy can be addressed through policy, although that might not apply for everyone.

[Shakattack]

The last line is what's most important.

So many people keep buying Office because it's all they've ever known, and it works. And you see that much more on the older side of 40. But for the future generations, that do know about OpenOffice and GoogleDocs, well why would they pay for Office?

Look at actual computer sales too. Windows obviously has an overwhelming market share, but look at colleges. When incoming freshmen are looking at what to buy, not many are saying "I really want that new Windows 7 Dell laptop!". Instead everyone wants the sleek, sexy MacBooks - I'd say anywhere from 60-70%. College students today are the consumers of the future, and if they buy Mac for college they're probably going to stick to Macs for a long time.

Microsoft isn't retarded though (okay maybe Balmer is), they know the situation. Zune, Xbox, Microsoft retail stores? You think Microsoft needed that 10 years ago?

[usaar333]

Things that force me to keep windows installed (not all MS products, but in a sense require you to have windows):

1) Powerpoint - Impress can't even import many powerpoint presentations correctly, and offers far less pre-made themes,. and is overall very weak competitively. (In general, the entire Office suite wins over the alternatives; the powerpoint/impress difference though really stands out).

2) Games. - You can't play 95+% of FPSs on linux.

3) Laptops seem to work better with Win7 than Linux (Kubuntu), in terms of input/out (I'm using a Dell). The linux touchpad drivers are lacking TouchCheck, so accidental tapping while typing is a huge issue. Plugging into an external monitor is not automatic.

4) Full-screen flash remains screwy on linux.

[byoung2]

I'd be worried if I was Microsoft.

I'd be worried too:

Windows Mobile - Android

IIS - Apache

.NET - PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, etc

SQL Server - MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc

[flgb]

Products that work well with lots of other Microsoft products.

This is a particularly wicked problem for enterprises that have built a lot of custom line-of-business systems that are inextricably tied up in Microsoft's technology.

[ElbertF]

Keyboards. That's about it.

[trafficlight]

I also love the IntelliMouse. Version 3 to be specific.

[a1g]

hahaha, the ones with the fingerprint reader. They always have problems on non-Microsoft OSes or give you trouble getting into the BIOS(at times) because its a usb keyboard.

[groaner]

Support.

[jaytee_clone]

Things that I don't need to get separately when I buy a computer.

I'm not advocating for Microsoft. In fact, I use Linux, Open Office, and Gmail. But for regular consumer, they just want something that comes in one package and works without additional effort. That's why iPad is hitting the spot, because it's even more packaged than a Microsoft PC. Microsoft couldn't careless about Ubuntu, but they should definitely be worried about iPad (or packaged computing device in general).

[lelele]

Have you been blown away by Ubuntu? Wait until its next release and watch your hardware and/or software stop working.

If I was Microsoft, I wouldn't be worried that much. GNU/Linux is not a business, thus MS products will keep having a grip on gray suites for a long time. Microsoft has the resources to look after its OS. Startups thrive on free-software, but once the pointy haired bosses outnumber the hackers in them, the switch to enterprise friendly software is unavoidable.

[koeselitz]

Microsoft doesn't have very many resources compared to what Linux (and even Ubuntu) does. There are more people who use Linux than any other operating system in the world, and more developers working on it than on any other software project in the world. It gets more eyes and sees more development.

If there's anything for Microsoft to be worried about, it's that: you can't buy that level of active development. The work that goes into the Linux kernel alone takes thousands of developers around the world and manages tens of thousands of changes to the code every day. No company could ever do that on the traditional level.

That's what Google means: they've been figuring out a few ways of harnessing some of that extraordinary power for enterprise. Microsoft still works hard and turns out a good product, but I think there's a reason they have to pay so much more and work so much harder to develop something that is still perceived by the market as mediocre. You say the switch to 'enterprise' software is unavoidable - but Google, one of the largest and most successful companies of our time, recently dropped 'enterprise' operating systems in favor of their own version of an open source operating system when they made the decision to say that employees couldn't use Windows unless they got manager approval.

Having market share over document formats and things like that will preserve Microsoft's position for a while, but how long? The fact is that development on the old model - behind closed doors, by a team hired by a company, specifically for company goals - has been shown to be slow and outmoded. The companies that are really succeeding now are companies that realize this.