This month, Microsoft has refined its co -pilot price For Office 365, and you get a lot for your additional $ 30 per month. But it also reminds me of a product called Diaphony that I followed in the early 90s, just before the internet. At the time, I worked for IBM, who planned to compete with the diaphony, but like Microsoft Office, there were so many features and such a great inherited compatibility, and the conclusion was that it would cost too much to create an effective counter.
A few months later, the Internet was launched and the diaphony was toast. His ability to speak to a variety of information connected to the phone was simply not necessary because Ethernet became common. Netscape has rendered all these old things obsolete, as well as services like Compusing, MSN and AOL.
AI has the potential to do the same with its functions. This does not necessarily mean that the brand is dead, but I expect the competitive pressure will require the content of the product to change considerably in the coming years.
Let me explain.
The office is aging
The office started under a different name (s) in the 1980s. Initially, it was the productivity package for Apple. Finally, it has become an essential essential product for the rise of windows. The Office was a complex offer that had been in the process of internal products and acquired products that focused on word processing (which replaced by typewriters), database software (which replace the card files), presentation software (which replaced the rocking graphics) and a calculation product that replaced the calculators and many personalized mainframe and launch offers focused.
Unlike the Lotus symphonic offer, which was more monolithic and failed (largely because its nucleus was a spreadsheet which was less ideal than a more targeted offer), the office was a pack of products which were initially not designed to operate together. But they were integrated afterwards with mixed results at the start. The value was in the bundle, not in integration and connection hard to the windows, which has become the dominant office operating system and gave it an advantage that IBM could not overcome. Admittedly, IBM was almost in force when they tried this, and Microsoft had become greater power in industry than the IBM down at the time.
It is an old product that even goes back before the internet that has been effectively updated so far, but I think AI will return the script.
Why will the AI make the office obsolete
You work with AI via prompts. If you want him to create a document, a spreadsheet or a presentation, you tell him what you want, then the AA creates it. AI, not the components of the office, focuses on demand and result. He does not need a word processor, a program of propagation sheets or a presentation set, he must simply be formed to understand and then develop the result. Generally, it does not need a database because it already contains one, which informs its results.
If you ask the AI to create an image, it does not use a photo editing package, a drawing package or other targeted tools like a human artist. Instead, he takes your management and, on the basis of his training, creates a finished product.
Just as you didn't need a typewriter or a calculator when you had a PC, an office and Windows, you don't really need a PC, an office or a window if you want to create a document, an image, a graphic or analyze the financial results. You just need data, a series of well -trained prompts and AI to do the work.
In short, it is only a matter of time before someone discovers only with an EI correctly formed, you do not need all the complexity and cost of the office. AI is sufficient.
Packaging
The industry involves major events that obsolerate existing technologies on an irregular rate. Mainframes have eliminated the accountants. PCS has removed most of the autonomous office technology (typewriters, calculators, Rolodex). Mobile phones have removed paid phones and wired lines (still in progress). The Internet has released online babbles and most faxes. Smartphones have withdrawn autonomous MP3 players, mobile phones and telewriters, and the iPhone alone has released a number of mobile phone companies.
The AI will be much more disruptive because it leads to autonomous vehicles (earth, air, water), robots and assistants and digital companions. As it matures, it will eliminate human controlled vehicles, many jobs currently carried out by humans and most of the existing digital ecosystem.
I expect it to be a matter of time before someone realizes only a productivity offering founded Superposition a like a co -pilot) will be the way to do to Microsoft what Microsoft has done to Lotus and what Apple did to Nokia.
As Apple did under Steve Jobs, Microsoft could make this exhibition and bring out this product itself. Jobs cannibalized the iPod with the iPhone, which worked very well for Apple. It is interesting to note that Microsoft first found this plan, but Steve Ballmer killed this effort in favor zune. It did not work well for Ballmer or Microsoft. What Apple did was very unusual because the initiates of the company are generally not willing to put existing key products at terminal risk. Thus, although Microsoft can do it, there is a good chance that it will not see this risk early enough to prevent another business from doing so first and taking the market.
As Microsoft pivots at AI, there is an increasing potential that will make this decision, but leadership is still a cloud, not based on AI, which could lead to a faux pas de Nokia. We will see. The clock turns at the end of the office and the emergence of a real productivity tool based on AI.
