Here’s why: Apple has surprisingly little enterprise experience in the company despite its mobile device dominance in the workplace. That’s left CIOs scrambling to devise their own device policy and an opening for Microsoft to bring clarity to it. Apple is officially in danger of losing their enterprise foothold. Ouch!
To make matters worse, with the acquisition of Perceptive Pixel, Microsoft now controls the complete touch ecosystem from small device to large. And with yesterday’s announcement of an Enterprise App store where its apps and data work seamlessly across every device large and small, Apple now appears to be less strategic to the enterprise. Who is going to buy an iPad when the device becomes an information silo?
Discussing Microsoft’s new Office as a Service, which includes social, cloud, large and small multi-touch devices and Office 2013, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO said, “This is the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done in our history. We’ve designed Office for the cloud and the full range of Windows 8 devices.”
The 10 Big Enterprise Revelations No One Is Talking About -- But Should Be
Ballmer and his team spent a lot of energy presenting their new Office 2013 technology on Monday, but didn’t clearly outline the impact to the enterprise. If they spent more time defining the future for CXOs in a credible way and offering a realistic path to get there, they will not only win the device war, but will own a strategic mandate to guide organizations to where Microsoft wants them to go. IBM has done this effectively in defining the Social Enterprise, Microsoft should take note.
Jeff Han, CTO of Perceptive Pixel offered me the best explanation of Microsoft’s future workplace vision: “We're focused on the enterprise, we're focused on productivity, we're focused on the future, when you think of that, you think of Office.”
Let’s explore the what the rest of the media hasn’t caught on to – and that are essential to understand:
- The Enterprise App Store means that each of the Office 2013 products become instantly more valuable. With its 1 billion Office users, there will be developers clamoring to develop new solutions for Office products that solve infinite business cases.
- True Enterprise Licensing means that CIOs no longer need to work with Apple’s extremely difficult provisioning system to install apps across the enterprise. CIOs will be able to provision apps across a broad range of devices depending on employee need.
- One App, Many Devices means that information will flow across devices - always synced and always displaying the latest updates.
- Social Ties Everything Together and Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer makes the enterprise a smaller place. Microsoft wants you to build a social network across its products and solutions. Expect a big fight with IBM & Google, but Apple doesn’t do social at its core.
- Contextual Information will give you the right information at the right time in the right place. For example, if someone emails you in Outlook, you’ll see contextual widgets that will provide more information about the people, documents and information contained in the email.
- Ability to Follow Documents and People will connect you to the latest document updates no matter what device or program you’re running at the time. No more missed updates, no more looking at a previous version of the document.
- Aggregated Activity Stream across all apps and partner apps. Will eventually become contextual according to device, app and information on-screen. Will get smarter over time so that information you need to see finds you.
- Big Screens Replace Whiteboards and will be initially used for large scale, strategic views of things like real time supply chains, interactive dashboards, scenario planning, big architectural or map related projects, large diagramming scenarios and remote interaction. We’re only at the beginning here as apps will need to be developed by innovative entrepreneurs to make this more valuable.
- Integration with other Microsoft Products will now become much easier. Microsoft will deliver integration between their products. Partners will deliver integration from enterprise solutions like Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle to each or all of the Microsoft products.
- Workplace Will Become Much More Interactive as these new small to large devices enter the workplace. Expect the workplace to be less like Mad Men and more like Minority Report. Especially when Microsoft adds Kinect to Perceptive Pixel’s technology, Office and partner apps.
The 5 Unanswered Questions And Why Microsoft Could Lose
Make no mistake, Microsoft has just changed the rules for the future workplace. They’re asking CXOs to take a leap of faith and most will consider it. Because when they look at Apple in the enterprise, they feel something is missing. Executives recognize leadership when they see it – and what they see is a lot of ‘not much’.
But Microsoft has some significant challenges. Most importantly a better user experience on the tablet. Microsoft needs to give Surface that addictive quality that the iPad has - which means more Metro and less legacy Windows. To be more precise, it needs to be more Metro when in a mobile context and more Windows-like when the user is trying to create a lot of content.
Second, Microsoft lacks social in their DNA and is at risk of not following through with social. As Futurist and Author Paul Miller put it to me: “Clearly Microsoft is making a big push to expand its current and near-term future enterprise technologies. The purchase last month of Yammer, the social networking tool for business, for $1.2 Billion is about upgrading its next version of SharePoint (its intranet plus digital workplace platform) which is great for the next few years - but then what?” The ‘now what’ for me is to place Yammer CEO David Sacks in charge of Office 365 and let the visionary control the social experience for Microsoft productivity tools. He’s the real deal.
Third, on Monday, I didn’t see anything about ‘smart data’ or data analytics. It’s a big miss. Expect a big announcement or acquisition - there's simply too much data being created to deprive a solution that makes sense of it. IBM and SAP are taking the lead here, Microsoft needs to follow suit.
Fourth, Microsoft needs to get the price way down on the big Perceptive Pixel screens. Small to mid sized companies are not going to replace whiteboards with expensive screens. Microsoft or its partners need to create a few killer apps for the large screens or the technology risks ending up going hyper-niche like the Segway.
Microsoft also faces intense competition. Look for competing visions from IBM, Salesforce and Google – and perhaps a few choice words from Ellison at Oracle. The good news though is that no matter the winner, it’s going to get easier for us to be productive in the workplace. And that’s the first major improvement since the introduction of the computer.
I believe Phil Sorgen, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President summed it up for me best, “Organizations that embrace how their employees work best, such as through collaboration software and consumer-centric devices, are building a strong foundation for a productive future.”
You can bet on a few missteps along the way, but our workplace is going to change drastically in the next five years. And change means a workplace that exists anywhere and everywhere. Are you preparing?
