How mobile will kill off Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is in the enviable position of being on practically everyone’s desktop or laptop, even though it hasn’t offered anything new since the 1997 edition (or maybe 2002/XP version, which added hyperlinks support) that 95 percent of the users need. Yet users and companies pay $200 or so per license every few years because — well, because it’s a bad habit we’ve all gotten into that provides Microsoft huge ongoing revenues in return for, frankly, nothing.

Microsoft Office 2010 is the latest unnecessary version, loaded with collaboration features that almost no one uses, while also tying you more and more to Windows Server products.

So how does mobile fit in? Well, for Microsoft die-hards, there’s Office Mobile 2010 for certain Windows Mobile 6.5 phones — and for forthcoming Windows Phone 7 devices. But there are also a couple solid Office-compatible editors for iPhones and other iOS devices, for BlackBerrys, and for Android devices: DataViz’s Documents to Go and Quickoffice’s Quickoffice Mobile Suite. They cost $15 each and are roughly equivalent to what WordPad can do on a PC for text editing; they also support basic Excel and, to a lesser degree, PowerPoint work. And many mobile devices can display Office files for reading using built-in, free apps; iOS’s Preview app is the most capable of these.

Given that most people use Office to read and comment on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files and maybe to do some rudimentary documents (think about how many documents you now do wholly in email), these mobile desktop productivity tools are close to delivering what most workers need. And soon, they’ll be there. As mobile devices such as the iPad gain business adoption, fewer and fewer people will find themselves working on documents on a PC, but instead use tools like Documents to Go and Quickoffice on their slates or smartphones.

That will finally cause businesses to wonder why they spend $200 every few years for a new version of a product that can be replaced by a $15 or $30 product on the devices people increasingly prefer to use anyhow. The spreadsheet jockeys, marketing mavens, and sales gurus will still need a rich tool like Office, but most other employees won’t.

I doubt Microsoft will offer a $15 or $30 version of Office for iOS, BlackBerry, or Android. Yes, Office Mobile 2010 will come with Windows Phone 7, but I doubt that platform will take off, so it won’t matter.

If you think I’m nuts, consider what’s already happened to Adobe Systems and its Acrobat product. Once Apple added PDF annotation to Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s built-in Preview app, the need for both the free Adobe Reader and the $449 Acrobat Pro dropped significantly among Mac users. Acrobat Pro has picked up more and more capabilities, but they are relevant for a tiny fraction of the user base. Mac users have largely abandoned the pricey, full-featured Acrobat unless they are creating Acrobat forms or doing PDF-based publications that need its security management and hyperlinking capabilities. On Windows, Adobe offers the less-capable $299 Acrobat Standard, but not on the Mac — that product’s “middle market” evaporated when Preview incorporated the Acrobat capabilities that most users needed.

I can see the same shift occurring for Office over the next few years as mobile users realize what they’ve always whispered: “I really don’t need all that stuff in Office. My mobile app does just what I need.” Hmm, maybe they’ll wonder to do with all those Windows Server boxes (excluding Exchange, of course) that they realize they don’t need, either.

This article, “How mobile will kill off Microsoft Office,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com.