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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?"
Buying Microsoft Office = expensive.
Using Google Apps = US$ X per year.
Downloading Open Office = free, except for the bandwidth (which you need to connect to Google Apps anyway).
If I was in charge of a small company, I know what that company would use... and what solution would be the best to preserve it from our friends at the SPA.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I'm sorry but it's been a long while since I have felt comfortable with Google's 'do no evil' mantra. They are a billion dollar company with shareholders to report to. I wouldn't be suprised if in 5-10 years we see the same sort of slashback here we see now for MS applied to Google. I particularly don't like the way the toolbar trawls my PC for information to report back to the Googel servers. It was at that point I stopped seeing them as saviours and more like the circling vultures they may well turn out to be.
I cant imagine a real company allowing its data to be housed outside its control. But if google sells a server in a box that houses all the apps needed to meet most of the documents needed, it could make sense. IT takes care of maintaining this big server. And all the other people use stripped down pc with no USB dongle, no print screen, no copy-paste that runs a simple browser to create the documents and with a full audit trail for all printed copies, it makes sense. Really. Companies are paranoid about security. Currently any document in the intranet server can be saved to usb thumb drive, cut/paste into emails, or forwarded via emails ... If Google or any company can promise a full information lock-down to the management, they will get a sympathetic ear.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Google is doing what Microsoft has dreamed about forever - turn computer platforms into monthly revenue generators. This has been the source of erotic dreams for Microsoft executives forever. I don't care how cool a web application is, there is just something fundamentally wrong with having my productivity depend on someone else's servers.
In some measure, this is already the case - how many people at work haven't searched online for solutions to problems encountered at work. This being one form of online dependence. This is a far cry from depending on an outside server. Think about the exposure to DoS attacks that this makes your company? Corporate war is just around the corner. Get a botnet to bring down your competitor's internet and their entire workforce productivity drops to zero.
Additionally, just wait until some security hole opens up and a lawyer's documents are hacked into because they are being edited online.
This is just a bad, bad idea on its face.
Should we be suspicious of every large business that started out small? At what point does a small, presumably non-corporate business become "big" and full of the "temptations of corporate culture"?
Google's shareholders have virtually no voice in the operation of the company, remember? How can a company be answerable to people that never had a real voice in the company in the first place?
Cautious? Sure. Suspicious? I'm not sure.
I thought the apps included the 'docs and spreadsheets' module ? It'd be a bit weird to omit them ... of course it doesn't run on Safari just yet, and I can't be bothered to install Firefox just to find out...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I have read many times that its the lack of MS Exchange on *nix desktops that is the major stumbling block for a lot of businesses that have considered switching. If so, its fine by me if Google can offer an alternative to Exchange functionality for business users. Its much more likely that any google solution will be *nix compatible than anything MS will offer in the future.
Now, if there was only some way Google could wrest control over the games industry from Microsoft and let game developers develop for alternative platforms a bit easier. My gaming habits are the only thing keeping me from leaving XP completely. I am not likely to stop gaming, I can't/won't play consoles, and the future looks pretty MS monopolistic to me unless something changes. I think there are a lot of people like me out there too.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
As much as I hate to admit this. Excel has 1 feature that I've found has saved me personally at least a week.
Pivot Tables.
Until something comes along to rival pivot tables, Excel isn't going anywhere.
I know it isn't the point, but take a look at the keyboard in these pictures:
o ard/images/officekeyboard.JPGp g
http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/officexpkeyb
http://home.uchicago.edu/~iyjung/bigpictures/48.j
That is the way MS is pushing for layouts. Do you notice that the Insert key isn't there? It's now a control key off of some other random key. Which key that is will change between just about every keyboard model.
Sure, we can keep the Caps Lock key in the wrong place, hell, even on dedicated key at all, but we get rid of the Insert key. Go figure.
They aren't trying to replace Office (though if they include the Google Docs and Spreadsheet and PPT thing I'd be happy) - they are trying to replace corporate mail systems. Harvard
.mac (which needs to allow something.edu before its going anywhere and it'd be nice to have a Windows/*nix port of Backup). Personally I think the best solution for Harvard at least is to shut up and spend money and buy additional space, and redesign the webmail client (just keep pine around).
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516036 has been looking into it and I'd be thrilled if they do use a GMail like interface because the current FAS webmail system is a piece of tripe. (I logged into it once and then went back to SSH and pine - some departments don't even have a webmail interface because the damn thing is so bad).
The added storage space and some savings you'd get from moving to Google Apps is nice but a lot of students (well in Physics,astronomy anyway) still need to be able to SSH in and start a remote X session, which I don't see happening soon, so they are still going to have to spend money on their own servers. As the article points out Google isn't without competition - Windows has Live @edu (run away) and there is
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Does that mean Google is going to drop the "Beta" testing? Who charges for beta apps?
Google apps... Exchange Killer... Hahahahahahaaaaa!!!! I should save this post so that I can come back in five years and laugh at you again.
ck Microsoft? With the help of Google? Who would have thought? That's why Gates is getting a little jumpy...
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
This can't create a new monopoly (as it currently exists) since you can save your documents to your own machine in ODF, MS, or PDF format. The monopoly is in the lack of interoperability of file formats - not in applications. That's the whole point of the ODF standard - to allow different applications to operate on a file. Google Apps goes even one further since there are even more formats available. Now, if Google prevented you from saving your documents then that would be a different matter.
Graham
Y'know, I thought that too. But after a while, I had the following revelation:
I receive perhaps 40 or so emails per day through my (relatively spam-free) .mac account. Most of those are from mailing lists I've signed up to. When those mailing lists are busy, I can receive well over a hundred, hundred-and-fifty emails per day there.
I really don't want all those making my phone go 'bing' every five minutes.
Of course, that's not to say that we couldn't have free .mac push email anyway, as an added feature for .mac subscribers with an iPhone: it could be simple, tied to an alias (all emails sent to the alias account me_iphone@mac.com get pushed, as well as being delivered to the real 'me@mac.com' IMAP inbox in the usual fashion). It could be rules-based, setup online: everything marked urgent, not suspected to be spam, or sent by someone in my address book (or by someone on a specific list).
One of the things to remember, though, is that not everyone who buys an iPhone wants a .mac account. And of course if push email was only available through the purchase of a .mac account, you can bet that there would have been a lot of complaints about that 'hidden cost'
-Q
Google Apps are not going to replace Office any time soon.
1) A web based interface does not stack up to a native gui app.
2) Google Apps are not full featured.
3) Security. Shopping list on google servers - sure, why not.
My personal financial information - not a chance.
Corporate Data - You are kidding me, right?
4) Availability - no internet connection. no Google Apps.
Hmmmmmmmmn,
...
Google Inc. (GOOG ) is finally about to take a big leap onto Microsoft's turf. Since last August, the search leader has offered a test version of an online office productivity software suite, called Google Apps for Your Domain,
I think to be honest you should have included the rest of the sentence you quoted. Namely: that lets companies offload e-mail systems to Google while keeping their own e-mail addresses.
The article makes it perfectly clear what Google Apps is.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I can't imagine a company putting something as vital as email entirely outside it's walls...
Y'know, five years from now we'll be saying that you can imagine a company doing something that vital itself. It's going to be a bad time to be a sysadmin, believe me.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
What happens if you are unhappy with Google's offerings, and want to move to another platform? How do you get your users emails and calender events out if your email solution does not support IMAP or give you access to the raw data in a proprietary format?
We are not even considering Exchange as we have 500GB of emails for 200 employees with the largest mailboxes being well over 10GB, but whatever we use, we want the option to move to something else if we need to. Is that an option with Gmail?