Is Microsoft Office in danger of losing its monopoly on the business tools category?

Yet another company, Live Documents, has come out and announced an impending challenge to Office. For more than a decade, business users have become accustomed to Word, Excel and PowerPoint being the staple tools of choice. Two competitors are starting to gain traction – Google with their Google Docs offering and ZOHO with their growing suite of inexpensive Web-based tools. When Microsoft was in the middle of fighting a barrage of monopoly charges by various governments, Bill Gates was saying that the software business was fickle. He assured regulators that Microsoft could be dethroned at any time. Many people scoffed, but the truth is he was more right than he probably cared to be. Many college students have begun to use the less expensive web-based Office lookalikes and we all know where that goes. Within a few years, they will carry their preferences into the marketplace and Office will slowly lose market share. Microsoft is a powerful force, and has more cash on hand than many small countries. That being said, there is no doubt that competitors are nibbling around the edges. I have long believed that Google and others would offer Office like applications for free by using the ad supported model to drive revenue. This will segment the market and will force Microsoft to follow suite and lower pricing and capabilities, or simply let these competitors take over the lower end of the market. One thing I am sure of… The days of charging $300 for Office and getting the masses to pony up are slipping away.

Will LinkedIn Sell to the Man?
I remember the first time I received an invitation in my email from a business contact that wanted to link with me. It was over 2 years ago and since that time, I have watched intently as the network grew. LinkedIn has patiently grown the company into a serious force. They have approx. 16.5 million users, and of those, approx 5.2 million have at least 5 contacts. The number of people with more than 500 falls off sharply to just around 5600. Still, all in all, they have become the market leader in this type of managed network tool. As of late, Plaxo has been gaining traction in a serious way with their Pulse product that they still list as being in Beta. I have probably received at least 10 invitations to connect with people through Plaxo in the last few weeks. I am not sure if this level of traction gives LinkedIn an incentive to sell, but it has to be good timing to monetize the user base they have grown. I have looked for LinkedIn to sell to one of the eCommunities for some time, and expect that they will also decide that the application is better merged with the user-base of another application like MySpace, Facebook, or the like…