Maybe its just me, but I swear I read the exact same thing year after year. Only thing different each year is the author(s). Makes you wonder how long it takes for giants to die.
Yeah. I've always thought they'll "die" the way IBM did; still significant, still profitable, still a force to be reckoned with, just not dominating the industry anymore. Arguably, that's already come to pass, or we're very close to it. It gets easier every year to build large companies that simply ignore them. (It's always been possible, but it continues to get easier.)
While predicting their Imminent Demise™ does get old after a while, I would point out that for years, people have been pointing out that they make all their money on Windows and Office and have failed to penetrate any other market. This has remained true. People further point out that sooner or later, those markets aren't going to be as lucrative as they once were. I think we're only now beginning to see that, but I also think it'll snowball once "I have a Linux-based system" is no more weird than "I have a Mac". (Linux and Mac both legitimize each other.) The arguments that Microsoft are going to "die" (their dominance if not the actual company) are well-founded in structural arguments about how they get to their bottom-line, not merely GPL-hippie wish-fulfillment fantasies. Without a lucrative third-front, Microsoft can not continue as the force they are today. That the argument is old doesn't mean it's not true, it simply didn't happen as quickly as some people anticipated(/wanted).
(I'd actually characterize the XBox as doing better than the article does, but it's still nowhere near profitable enough to build the company around, nor does it seem to have prospect of doing so. I can't think of anything else that could support them, either.)
Still, Microsoft office remains the supreme software suite for the office, I don't see anything on the horizon that is challenging this.
After all the hype about open office it still lacks the compatibility and efficiency of getting things done in ms office, because Windows is such a juggernaut and whether you like it or not many features are built specifically for Windows, which gives Microsoft such a gaping advantage which will not disappear until people stop using Windows, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
"Still, Microsoft office remains the supreme software suite for the office, I don't see anything on the horizon that is challenging this."
I do. People realizing that the office suites aren't really contributing that much to their productivity and learning to use them much less, to the point where they can be replaced by commodity suites.
The real killer for getting off of Office for BigCorp is that they wrote apps in Office. This was dumb. (Excepting spreadsheets, which were actually designed for this to some extent.) These apps are moving to the web, probably with Microsoft web technologies. This is also not necessarily a brilliant move, but it's much less dumb that actually trying to write a Word document that is also an app.
Secretaries passing around press releases don't need Office.
Office suite usage has been very warped by being the only game around, in much the same way the web is getting warped into an application platform, only more so. As the Office application platform is eclipsed by the web application platform, it becomes easier to get off of office.
What Office will be replaced by is simply... not Office. Not OpenOffice per se, just... not buying Office.
Maybe you just think Detroit. But I think with Microsoft it is a special case, because they are "evil".
In my oppinion Google has similar problem, but the are not evil. So nobody wishes them away.
