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The Evolution of Office Software—From DOS-Based Interfaces to Cloud-Powered Solutions

August 31, 2022

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Office software—software that helps us work with the most common data aggregations (documents, tables, graphs, databases) and are installed on most personal computers—is going through inevitable transformations. In this article, we will take a brief look at the evolution of office software.  

Software Installed on Devices

In the category of Office-type software suites for desktop or notebook PCs, Microsoft is the company that has been dominating the market for years. Its office solution tends to feature Word (document processing), Excel (spreadsheets), PowerPoint (slide-show presentations) and Access (databases). Today, Microsoft’s office applications, called Office 365, have reached a high level of maturity that is difficult to match. 

In recent years, on-premise software solutions were made available on the Internet—which enabled partial cloud migration. The commercial contracting of Office software has moved from purchasing perpetual licenses to periodic licenses (subscriptions), thereby giving the user the advantage of paying exactly for what they use (Software-as-a-Service licensing).

Quasi-Free Office Suite

Microsoft Office was first announced by Bill Gates at COMDEX in Las Vegas, on August 1, 1988. Initially, a marketing term for an office suite, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint.

In the early 2000s, there was a paradigm shift (coming from the Linux world) in the creation and distribution of software solutions. It was called open-source and the OpenOffice.org project, promoted by Sun Microsystems, was the first major player in the field of office applications. Soon enough, OpenOffice became the best free office software suite running on Windows, Linux, MacOS and Solaris platforms. 

Today, the solution is owned and managed by the Apache Software Foundation and contains the modules Writer (document processor), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (slide-show presentations), Draw (vector graphics), Math (formula editing), and Base (databases).

But Apache OpenOffice is not the only office software suite that can be installed for free or at a low cost on your device. There are other solutions on the market, often comparable to the industry benchmark—Office 365—and many are mature and robust, such as Libre Office, FreeOffice, Mobisystems OfficeSuite Professional, WPS Office, etc.

In time, Microsoft’s classic applications imposed real standards on the market for document formats—forcing other software solutions to adopt the DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX file formats, with compatibility becoming both a natural requirement and a marketing feature. 

Modern office software suites from various vendors, free or not, cover most (or almost all) of the features that Office 365 applications have. These aspects deserve a bit of analysis from the perspective of the existence of alternative solutions on the market. In terms of document-file compatibility, other established formats are used, such as RTF, PDF, HTML, CSV, SLK, 123, and DBF. 

In terms of functional similarity of classic applications, things are advanced both in terms of user interface and in terms of similarity of internal facilities—including macro-command language and syntax of functions used in table calculations. However, beyond the high degree of similarity, the additional functions offered by a professional/commercial version may justify the cost difference. For example, Office 365 contains features offering us a clear advantage, more efficiency, more thoroughness or creativity, and faster/intuitive support. 

Cloud Applications

Office-type applications have slowly migrated their software resources to the cloud, to the point of being hosted entirely on the developer’s servers. Such resources are organized as cloud-computing services—or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)—and can be accessed either by the application installed on the PC or the mobile device.

In the case of Microsoft Office, the new Office 365 is similar to the desktop version, and there’s good reason to think that these two versions will merge in the future. But there is an even more widely used cloud solution, namely, Google Docs. Google’s office suite can be accessed through an internet browser as a web app or through an app installed on a mobile device, and it offers Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, and Google Sites. Also worth mentioning is the Apple iWork suite, which exists both as a desktop app (running on macOS and iOS operating systems), and as a cloud app. Other interesting cloud solutions are Polaris Office and Zoho Workplace.

Conclusion

From the DOS-based interface installer of Microsoft Office version 1 for Windows to today’s sophisticated cloud-powered integrated solutions, office-type software has come a long way. And despite the threat of market dominance by Microsoft and Google, other office suites vendors continue to provide competitive applications.