With Excel, I'm not sure. But if customers who are getting increasingly greater exposure to UNIX, through various channels, learn about UNIX alternatives to Active Directory and Exchange that work as well or better, but which cost less, it may well come to pass.
Imagine you have somethng to sell, I have the ability to place ads in people's homes via their electronic devices and I give you the choice of placing an ad for your product in one of two places.
You can place the ad into everyone's photo albums so that when they are flipping through photos they will see your ad.
Or you can place your ad in everyone's telephone book so when they are looking up the contact information for some source of some product, they will see your ad.
Which one would you choose?
Of course, in the real world, advertisers can choose both. They will advertise both on Google and Facebook.
"Hey, they had income for 3 years in a row. One billion last year. This is a sure winner."
They refuse to look at what Facebook actually does.
People will probably read your post and think you're biased because you work for Google. But there's a huge difference in what Google Plus can accomplish. You guys have the search engine data (intent) to combine with the social data.
So why doesn't Microsoft let Facebook combine with Bing? Then they would have a search engine. Or are they planning to do that already?
Privacy is available, right now, for free. The cost, if there is one, is getting all your friends to stop using a single website started run by a sociopath who does not believe in the idea of privacy and start using an open source peer to peer solution that is not controlled by any single person or entity.
This is a reasonably good blog post, especially the part about Google.
However the title is inaccurate. It should be
"Facebook's lack of a business model"
Hey, listen, reading is not for everyone.
You need to be smart, like Jeff Atwood.
Can you believe that programmers look up to this guy?
What does that say about programmers?