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Google Apps to Become Paid Service
FredDC writes "Business Week reports Google Apps is becoming a paid service soon for companies who wish to use it for their domain. Disney and Pixar are reportedly thinking about switching to Google Apps instead of using Microsoft Office. Could this be the end of a monopoly? Or the start of a new one?"
WTF? Why is Pixar considering Google Apps? Isn't Apple's .mac service up to scratch?
Anyway, I've been using Apps for my personal domain for quite a while. It's pretty great for a freebie - just point your mx records at google, create an admin account and google takes care of everything else. Setup catch all accounts, gmail accounts for different users, calender, gtalk, etc are all there.
But I won't continue to use it if it costs anything. Like I said, its great for a freebie.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Nice how you can install windows without Google Toolbar , huh.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The use of Google Apps will not create a monopoly. Rather, it will precede a shift to real open formats (i.e., not Microsoft's XML implementations) which are application agnostic. Interfaces, rather than applications, are what must be open to truly benefit consumers.
Contrary to the title, it's not MS-Office that google is going after, it is Exchange.
Every Exchange admin I have ever spoken with claims that it is a nightmare to set up and maintain. There is a trend now to outsource that functionality. Google is targeting that market.
Simply because a tiger hasn't eaten your face yet doesn't mean it won't in the future. We should be as suspicious of google as we are of any other big software company. Just because they have a catchy bumper sticker slogan doesn't inoculate them to the temptations of corporate culture.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
The answer to that question is in your own sig.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Let's pretend $MegaCorp dumps MS Office and implements Google apps. What the fuck am I supposed to use to write my documents, spreadsheets and now presentations if I'm in a car, plane, train, backwards country -- wherever I can't jack into the Net? Notepad?
This won't even put a dent in the M$ office suite installed base, because locally installed apps still work when the network is down and/or having problems.
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Seriously, for all the Web-based e-mail/office applications, I'm surprised at how little effort or thought is put towards migrating legacy data. SugarCRM and Gmail at least have some import capabilities (Outlook contacts in CSV format) but what about all of your old mail, calendar items, to-do/task lists, Excel macros, and Access databases? Every time one of my colleagues suggests yet-another-Web-based AJAX office suite, I shake my head and wonder how they expect existing organizations and individuals to switch without some sort of well-planned migration strategy?
Look, I'm not expecting some nifty migration wizard to automagically convert my existing data to $shinyWebbyOfficeSuite (I've been through enough Novell to Microsoft migrations to know that never works) but I'd like to see one of these would-be Office alternatives make a concerted effort to bring me on board besides marketing and hype.
body massage!
I think virtually any office environment would be insane fools to replace Microsoft Office with Google's apps. I'm really stunned that nobody on /. has pointed out the glaringly obvious problems:
1. The Internet
If for any reason the company loses it's internet access (this NEVER happens) that company has NO access to any of their internal data yet they still have to pay for that non-existant access. One fiber cut or lightning strike can knock out internet access for days for many companies. If they were running Google apps they'd basically have to completely close up shop for that period.
2. Performance
These are web apps, so they're inherently slow. Google Docs and spreadsheets slows to a crawl with very large documents. Gmail in an account with thousands of emails is painful.
3. Data integrity
Google encourages users in the software to store all their documents on Google's servers, not locally. Is google willing to guarentee those documents availability? Are they doing regular backups? I happen to know that they don't. My gmail account has spontaneously lost mail, for example.
4. Security
Security on Google apps is feeble and basic, you might as well publish all your internal information to the web.
5. Features
Google apps only have a tiny fraction of the features of MS Office, or even OpenOffice. Unless you're only doing very basic tasks, Google's apps lack features you are currently using.
I want to expand on this last point. The feature-set of the google apps is INCREDIBLY sparse compared to MS Office. Gmail is nice for webmail, but it's SLOW and has only a crude filtering mechanism (no folders = retarded) nowhere NEAR as sophisticated as Outlook, or any of a dozen proper email applications. Many of Google's own employees complained quite loudly when the company switched from Exchange to Gmail due to the lack of features, particularly in regards to Google Calendaring, which sucks. Their spreadsheet app apparently has no graph or reporting capabilites. None.
The whole ASP concept is basically snake oil. Vendor lock-in at it's absolute worst.
I dont see them killing off MSO, nor becoming anything other then a 'fad'.
The professional world in general isnt ready for 3rd party hosting of their daily bread and butter apps, yet. Someday perhaps, but after being stung from the last attempt at a return to the concept of ASPs, not many will step up to the plate again for a while.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Does anybody know what the implications of Sarbanes-Oxley are for doing this? After all, Disney is a public company, and SOX has a number of regulations regarding how public companies are permitted to store their data. Are hosted apps ok?
What, is Google forbidding them from developing for other platforms now? Is that the only thing keeping developers back?
I'd think it would have something to do with MS's OS marketshare, but maybe that's me.
And, of course, by reducing users' dependence on MS Office, this would qualify as something that helps reduce MS domination of the home PC market. Now, if only some OEM were brave enough to piss off MS by majorly undercutting Windows boxes with a PC running Linux, configured to be plug-and-play/work out of the box... of course, that depends on more stable Linux builds, open drivers, etc.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I think moving the END key is a bigger loss on those keyboards than moving the INSERT. INSERT has long been the copy / paste key (depending on the modifier key), but that is giving way to CTRL+C/V on Windows (which is who M$ makes hardware for). I think even some window environments on Linux use CTRL+C/V (though the last time I used Linux on the desktop, it was often inconsistent). However, all text editing that I know of on PCs uses END to go to the end of a line or CTRL+END to go to the end of the document. Having to change muscle memory for that will be a bitch.
It took me awhile to stop hitting END and HOME, but I'm far more happy with Mac's COMMAND+RIGHT/LEFT/UP/DOWN to get places in documents. On a Mac that would be a decent keyboard. On a PC, I'd smash it by the end of the day.
I cant imagine a real company allowing its data to be housed outside its control.
Guess what: a lot of real companies can't imagine trusting their most important data to only their in-house IT guys. Otherwise there wouldn't be successful companies that handle the outsourcing of hosted apps, backups, e-commerce, and so on. And there are. There are also plenty of companies that thought they had it all under control internally, and totally blew it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I can't find anywhere that it says the service is to become a paid service. The article talks about everything but that. Now I suspect that some or all of it MAY become non-free, in fact the sign-up makes that pretty clear. It also says that people who sign up during the beta will continue to get the service for free.
Only thing in this article about paying anything though is that Microsoft has a competing product for $39/mo and that Google employees get "paid massages", maybe whoever wrote the summary was thinking of paid messages or something.
The monolithic state of the (PC) gaming industry is not the fault of Microsoft. PC gaming before DirectX was flat-out terrible. Support for OpenGL (or lack thereof) is not the fault of Microsoft either. Fiddling around with drivers in Linux just to play a PC game is not for the vast, vast majority of gamers. Mac users were simply looked over due to lack of marketshare (although that may change with Intel chips being used now).
Microsoft: Takes so long to start you wonder if it's going to California and back.
Google: It really is going to California and back.
Microsoft: Releases buggy software without version numbers, like "XP", "Vista", and "Millenium Edition"
Google: Releases buggy software without version numbers, all called "Beta".
Microsoft: Builds software with a crappy user interface, which they designed themselves.
Google: Builds software with a crappy user interface, because that's what your browser comes with.
Microsoft: Buys small companies for technology they haven't figured out how to build themselves, like Frontpage and Hotmail.
Google: Buys small companies in technologies they've already mastered, purely for marketshare, like Youtube and Blogger.
Microsoft: Releases devices in garish colors, like poop brown.
Google: Releases devices in garish colors, like piss yellow.
Microsoft: Has none of my personal data, because I choose not to give it to them.
Google: Has all of my personal data, because that's how you use their service.
Come back in five years, but don't be so sure you'll be the one laughing.
Back in 2002, five years ago, Google had only been profitable for a couple of years, and was starting to make it into the top-five most visited web sites in some countries. Its non-www-search offerings were in their infancy: it had just acquired Deja News (in 2001), and was starting up Google News around 2002.
Today, www.google.com is the most visited site on the web. GMail is one of the best-known e-mail services in the world -- not bad for a service that was only born about three years ago. Large numbers of people don't know the difference between Google Groups and Usenet. Novel services like Google Earth are grabbing the attention of the Internet-using public. Google's profits are going up and up, and their novel business model is proving very effective.
Say what you will about Google, their obviously-overvalued stock, and their increasingly dubious "corporate ethics" (what happened to not being evil?). They are without doubt the biggest business success story in IT in the past five years. If anyone's going to topple Microsoft's power base -- whose applications really aren't that great in many cases, remember -- it's going to be a heavy-hitter like Google.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.