Reinvention (Premium)

Microsoft, the Oldsmobile of personal technology, has jumped back into the public consciousness thanks to AI. But AI is only an ingredient, a back-end service, in Microsoft's direct offerings to individuals. And while AI can breathe some new life into tired, legacy product lines like Windows and Office, it's not enough. These products need to be reinvented as well.

And there, we see good news and bad news: Microsoft has spent decades trying to reinvent both Windows and Office. But it has rarely been successful.

Given my fixation on Windows, that story has been told many times. Indeed, I wrote an entire book about it, called Windows Everywhere. But Microsoft Office is even more widely used than Windows, and it's gone through its own ups and downs over the years as Microsoft wrestled with the same problems that bedeviled Windows, most obviously the rise of web and mobile.

That said, Office better lends itself to a heterogeneous world in which Microsoft customers are using some variety of devices, and not just PCs. As such, it made a much quicker and more seamless transition into the cloud-focused Microsoft of today, starting with Business Online Productivity Services (BPOS), which, over time, expanded and evolved into such things as Office Online, Office 365, and now Microsoft 365.

But for better or worse, most people think "Microsoft Office" when they think of this now-expansive family of offerings, and they very specifically think of the Windows-based desktop application suite. Office and Windows are so synonymous in people's minds that many still believe that Office is part of Windows. And Microsoft has done nothing to shake this belief by enticing PC makers to bundle the (Microsoft 365-based) Office suite on most of their new PCs. I can't recall the last time I turned on a PC and didn't find Office preinstalled.

The negative side-effect of this perception is that it's hard for Microsoft to introduce successful new Office apps and services. In fact, it's possible that the only truly successful new Office app of the past two decades is Microsoft Teams. And that one is such an outlier that many likely don't even associate it with Office per se as it's a full-featured platform of its own, complete with its own extensible app infrastructure.

This is problematic in the productivity space because Windows is no longer at the center of personal computing but is, depending on how you measure things, only the third most-used personal computing platform, behind Android and iPhone/iPad. And so, yes, it was big news when Microsoft brought Office to mobile, starting with the iPhone, just as it was big news when it did so previously on the web. But these lesser Office versions have done little to drive new revenues because they're basically perks for Microsoft 365 subscriptions and not standalone offerings. People just aren't buying standalone Office products anymore, and, again, the classic desktop offerings are seen as part of Window...