Amazon Has Held Talks About Business App Bundle (bloomberg.com) 29
Amazon.com has held talks with several business-application makers about forming a "Rebel Alliance" to challenge Microsoft's commanding position in workplace productivity tools, according to a report. Bloomberg: The idea would have Amazon Web Services partner with the companies to offer a bundle of business applications sold for a single price, Insider reported, citing anonymous people familiar with the plan. Amazon has held talks with Dropbox, Salesforce's Slack, and Smartsheet, among others, Insider said. The publication reported that discussions on the alliance stretch back more than a year, though it's unclear whether they continue.
Pie Management. (Score:2)
Does this come with a slice of the company?
Not really an underdog... (Score:1)
We already have that (Score:3)
We already have plenty of competing [libreoffice.org] business apps [google.com]. Some of them are even free. They work great right up until you need to share content with a different platform. This is just Amazon adding yet another competing standard. [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not sure what Amazon would bring to the table. Google has billions of daily users, and the likes of Gmail and Google Drive to piggyback their office software into businesses. Yet they only have 5 million paying users for G Suite, compared to 200 million paying users for Microsoft Office 365.
How are Amazon going to break into that market?
An Empire / MS spokesman comments: (Score:2)
"Filthy Rebel Scum!"
Good luck. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless they plan to integrate all these services to work together seamlessly, like Gworkspace and O365 do, they have no hope.
What Apps? (Score:1)
Re-Inventing The Wheel. (Score:2)
It's true (Score:3)
I can confirm that they are indeed mulling something like this over. In short, Amazon is prepping to launch what would be essentially a replacement for MS Office.
It's a set of apps that are supposed to have "excellent" compatibility and "as much or more" functionality as MS Office does. And there will be some cloud storage bundled with it, backups, etc. At least as it stands now in it's formative idea-stage.
No word on if it'll ever see the light of day, but my guess is that there's a ~75% chance it will actually show up in the real world.
Never going to happen (Score:1)
Bozos doesn't even know what he's getting into and he isn't capable of hiring someone who is. The best result they can hope for is forcing this partially digested dog food on to some unfortunate company which will inevitably fail due to strange unresolved glitches, lost work and productivity.
Maybe the real plan is to terminally handicap these "partners" in anticipation of a cheap acquisition. But is Amazon even capable of utilizing the extra engineering capacity? They have something like 20,000 developers
Re: (Score:2)
Spoken like someone who worked for them before! (Ask me why I'd know that....)
Seriously, they burn *so* much valuable developer time on garbage internal projects that often don't even get final approval for implementation. They've got a mentality that each department should operate in a little silo, with the manager over that group trying to push his/her people to "invent!" constantly. The managers get into pissing matches with each other over who created the "next big thing" the company should use (and us
Re:Never going to happen (Score:4, Interesting)
Bozos doesn't even know what he's getting into and he isn't capable of hiring someone who is.
What makes you think that? He turned an online bookstore into ... Amazon. What about his business experience makes you think he can't hire competent people?
I know, "but software is different". Sure, but they've long been more than just a retailer. It's not like software development is new to them. It seems to me that they're got someone on staff who can hire a few developers
Besides, this is about the simplest big project you can imagine. MS Office formats aren't a moving target, and they're well-documented. I've written software that generates and consumes word docs. Not even professionally, just to meet a personal need. If one guy with a few hours of free time can manage that, it seems reasonable to me that a dedicated team of professionals can produce a sufficiently compatible office suite given a few years.
Amazon is many things. Dangerous. Evil. Cruel. But they're certainly not incompetent. Hell, even if, against all the evidence, they were actually incapable of hiring programmers or managing software projects, they have the resources to make it happen regardless. They have the cash to get the team they need there by trial and error.
It's a deal with the devil (Score:1)
Don't be surprised when the inevitable betrayal occurs. They'd be further off forming their own partnership and cutting Amazon out.
I'm Actually Interested (Score:2)
I'm actually interested to see what they come up with.
The world needs another overpriced monthly money suck.
Excel (Score:3)
They also need to find a way to make compatible plugin support. Way too many LoB apps have reliances on Word and Excel plugins today.
Re: (Score:2)
Outlook and calendar integration too, but Excel is the biggie. Word, PowerPoint, Visio etc. all have viable replacements.
The other problem is monopolistic power like bundling all the other software when all you really want is 3 or 4 applications. You don't have to use it but, your bean counters will ask why you are not using what you are paying for. Like, "Why are you paying for and using WebEx when we have Teams?".
Re: (Score:2)
Once you get into large complex spreadsheets you get into territory that would be better served by an actual database, unfortunately all the database interfaces suck. How many times have you seen weeks/months of work disappear down the tubes because the large complex Excel spreadsheet got corrupted and its designer had no recent backup? If they can make a spreadsheet-ish front end for a database back end they might have a real product worth spending money on.
Re: (Score:2)
Libreoffice can connect to backend databases as well, but it's somewhat primitive compared to Excel.
Re: (Score:2)
I rather like Libre Office, I install it on the laptops that we give to family in Peru. If it only does 10% of what Excel does that's still more than what 90% of users need.
My problem with Excel is that the spreadsheet is still hanging out there as a stand-alone with no security and no backup. I work in physical security, if I make a set of I/O functions they can do some pretty complex stuff, **BUT** the function config lives in the database. It gets backed up every night with the DB and I can limit who
MS announced that Win11 will use Amazons App Store (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I want Amazon competing with Microsoft, not forming an alliance with them. If that competition includes playing dirty tricks then that's all the better.
The best thing that could possibly happen would be if Amazon and Microsoft bankrupted each other but that doesn't seem very likely.
Re: (Score:2)
The Amazon app store deal can't be more than a stopgap for Microsoft. They want to get Androd apps on Windows ASAP. They've already given up on competing with Chromebooks directly, so they need to be able to offer Android apps to keep Windows relevant to casual users - and the school market.
But Microsoft wants to run its own app store, so if Android on Windows is successful, they're sure to start delivering the apps from their own store.
Re: (Score:2)
The could always become a metastore, delivering ASOP Apps from Amazon App Store, Samsung App Store, Huawei's App Store (once the sanctions are lifted), F-Droid App Store, etc.
I hear (Score:4, Funny)
Lotus notes is for sale and looking for a major player to partner with.
Re: (Score:2)
Lotus notes is for sale and looking for a major player to partner with.
Nope,
You must be thinking of Lotus SmartSuite, not Lotus notes.
IBM sold Lotus notes to HCL, an indian SW company
Do they have a commanding slice? (Score:2)
I thought Office was slowly dying.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm seriously asking, for the past 10 or so years, all I've used is Google docs.
I thought Office was slowly dying.
MsOffice is alive and well, both locally installed and in the cloud.
In my particular case, I was happily using LibreOffice while teaching at the university, but when I went to teach for the (telecom) industry, I had to return to MsOffice for compatibility.
Plenty of other examples from Colleages, Family and Friends.
Lotus SmartSuite and Corel Wordperfect Suite (Score:2)
All over again.
Even mighty Google has not cracked that particular nut yet with Docs suite.
Best of luck to Amazon.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope to see real competition so that we can have real standards, but Google docs is terrible. That's why it hasn't made serious gains.