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Microsoft Office a Monopoly Within a Monopoly

Decent Essays

Jacob Phillips
GB 6210
Microsoft Office A Monopoly within a Monopoly Microsoft Corporation has three major monopolies within itself: Office, Window’s, and Internet Explorer. Microsoft Office is a monopoly that sits on top of the Windows monopoly and makes money. Office is Microsoft's best monopoly, making profits of 60% per copy sold Microsoft’s main cash cows: Windows and Office are currently desktop applications. Microsoft has dominated the desktop scene for several decades. However, with current Internet startups and Google pushing, Microsoft has lagged with cloud computing and web applications. Microsoft Office is a commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and …show more content…

They are not sure though whether it is a workable strategy. Microsoft's plan is to embrace the demand for cloud-based tools for office workers, which promises to be less costly for companies than conventional software, and yet avoid cannibalizing the business that is its biggest single money-maker. The Microsoft unit that includes the Office family of products is a $20 billion per year business with pre-tax profit margins of 60%. (Arthur, 2011) It's bigger and more profitable even than the company's other big profit engine, the Windows PC operating system which ebbs and flows with the sale of PCs. Microsoft’s Office product line has an astounding 90+ percent market share. With such an impressive command of the market, many solution providers serving the SMB market have concluded that there is no viable alternative to Microsoft Office. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Several alternatives are priced significantly lower than MS Office and offer compatibility with the Microsoft product’s file formats and robust feature sets.

References
Microsof Office History In Brief. (2009, July 19). Retrieved 10 7, 2011, from http://www.intowindows.com/microsoft-office-history-in-brief/
About OpenOffice.org. (2011, Febuary 7). Retrieved October 7, 2011, from http://about.openoffice.org/index.html
Arthur, C. (2011, June 28). Microsoft Office 365 goes into battle with Google Apps. Retrieved October 9, 2011, from

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