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| The Altair 8800 kit (source) |
Microsoft has moved its core Microsoft 365 applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote -- to the Web, where reduced-capability versions are available for free.
Microsoft 365 generates billions of dollars of revenue each year. Why offer free versions online? Collaboration and competition with Google are obvious answers, but I wonder whether another is emerging. My guess is that AI agents will increasingly use Microsoft 365 applications to create and manipulate documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, and other information for users.
My first professional job was at IBM, where I keypunched programs and handed the card decks to an operator who added my program to a queue waiting to be run on a mainframe computer -- batch processing. Some years later, I typed a short Fortran program at an experimental Quicktran terminal at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. Time-sharing was an obvious game-changing paradigm shift.
The next one came when I picked up a copy of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine at the Savon Drug Store in Venice, California, and read about the MITS Altair 8800 computer kit. Another game changer -- I could now own my own tools, and I became a self-employed consultant a few years later. My next epiphany came at an Interop Conference in San Francisco when I typed a DIR command into a computer in Texas, and the output displayed as fast as if it were on my desktop. The Internet was revolutionary.
Are these Web applications game-changers like time-sharing, personal computers, and the Internet? I don't know. Microsoft has already moved the office to the Web. What happens when the primary user of that office is an AI agent rather than a person?