You're completely lost in your Silicon Valley mindset. Most of the western world still shows up to work and uses Office on Windows. Even in tech, I've seen non-technical workers request PC's just so they can use "real" Office. Office for Mac doesn't cut it. And while it might be good enough for you, it's not for many people who rely on Word, Office, and PowerPoint for work. Oh, and Google Docs is hardly free in the office.

I'm not saying this would happen tomorrow. Microsoft has enough inertia to fire all their developers and just sell the current version of Windows and Office for a long time. Hell, some 30% of computer users in China still use Windows XP.

After a few generations raised on smartphones and tablets without any Microsoft apps, Microsoft Office would just be a curiosity their parents used, like Corel Draw or dBase.

Fortunately Microsoft has taken note; there's rumor of Android Office apps, and the latest version of the Surface tablet is quite popular.

Microsoft, and in particular, Office is still going strong, but the stranglehold it had in the 90's is gone.

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Google may want businesses to pay, but going to docs.google.com and using your personal email address works just fine - much to the chagrin of IT departments everywhere.

Still he has a point. Kids will toy around with Google Docs but when push comes to shove when they're hired by PWC or Deloitte, Microsoft Office is where it's at.

Google Docs doesn't hold a candle against it while LibreOffice can barely sneeze in front of it.

I am very far from the valley, but we have mostly phased office out in favor of google docs. It turns out that easy sharing is the killer feature and that google docs really is good enough which will obviously differ based on what you do.

What non-technical users request won't matter, they will ask for whatever they are familiar with and complain if any icon is moved just slightly.

> Microsoft Office is being supplanted by Google Docs being both free and 'good enough'

I like Google Docs as much as the next guy or girl, but I find this hard to believe when we had to end a meeting several minutes into it when the Google Doc displayed an http-500-style error when trying to load a spreadsheet.

If you know what you're doing with Office/use the advanced features there is just no comparison. Office is the Emacs of the business world. But I suppose most people could get on well enough with Google Docs.

This is especially true with Excel and Access (and to a limited extent PowerPoint). It's insane how much business logic can (and often does) live inside some random Excel spreadsheet.

Word mail merges are actually a fully featured templating system. On top of the whole thing being scriptable. But I think this is less "discoverable" than Excel.

Linux owns everything else, but Microsoft still own the corporate - and home - desktop. Devs using Linux or Mac are not the majority of users.

I doubt MS owns the home anymore. The number from a few years ago showed college freshmen using Macs by 70%.

MS is still corporate-centric in the US, and popular in foreign countries where Apple stores don't exist in large numbers.

> The number from a few years ago showed college freshmen using Macs by 70%.

In the US, perhaps. Where I study, I can count the number of people owning MacBooks on my fingers. They're still way too overpriced/lacking in hardware compared to PCs at the same market rates.

Apple is also too expensive, by design, for 80% of the markets in developing countries.

Except the home desktop is a dying (or dead) breed - and many people will either have OSX laptops at home, or no traditional computer at all, only phones and tablets... They could choose Office 365 to some extent, but they could just as easily choose gApps.

Tales of the desktop dying are long in the tooth.

Windows is far, far away from becoming irrelevant.

A behemoth doing a pivot, but a pivot to what? And how are they going to monitize it?

Pivoting to becoming more service oriented. Azure/Office365 are their next generation core. Azure as a development target, which pragmatically makes sense as companies with Windows services/apps move to the cloud. And Office365 in the same vein. Not to mention them extending office to other platforms, which combined with Office365 (email) makes a lot of sense.

All of that said, outlook integration to office365 is actually worse as a mail client than it had been in the past with self-hosted Exchange. Counts don't update properly when you "delete all" from a folder, and even then it's inconsistent. I know it's to allow for better scale/resource control on the servers but it's still very annoying to say the least.

Probably, but the Google Apps sync tool for businesses kinda stinks too. What's better, besides self-hosting?