A recent post on MinimalMac posits an interesting case for the slow, growing sense of the irrelevance of Microsoft, at least in the applications space. Go and read the piece - it's excellent - but the gist is that for years Microsoft banked on Office being as important to users as, say, Windows. Office is Microsoft's biggest money maker and for most of this decade no self-respecting IT department would consider any alternatives, even though they existed. You needed it to get work done. OpenOffice? That stuff was just weird. However, with the rise of tablets, office workers have suddenly noticed that they don't need Office anymore. All they need is an email app, a notepad, and something like Dropbox. You can open Office docs on any device, you can edit text on nearly any

tablet, and $9.99 gets you a capable word processor on the iPad. In short, Office is becoming irrelevant....(Read more)