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Google Apps Premier Edition Launches
prostoalex writes "Google Apps is adding a premium offering: a custom 10-GB Gmail box, Google Calendar, GTalk instant messenger, Writely, Google Pages, Google Custom home page iGoogle and Google SpreadSheets for $50 a year per employee. The NYTimes provides some details on competitive pricing: 'By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange,... in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.' Boston.com quotes an analyst for Nucleus Research on Google's ease-of-use: '"What we see in the Google Apps is a real focus on making them easy to use and intuitive," she said. "And that's something that Microsoft has been unable to do in all of its years with Office."' But the same analyst is bearish on Google Apps' shortcomings relative to the mature Microsoft desktop products: 'Right now Google's going to give companies a better ability to negotiate with Microsoft.'"
Forgive my ignorance, but I thought that everyone except Google believes GChat to be a great time-waster, not something you'd offer to your corporate clients to increase productivity at work...?
Needing to be connected to the web sucks for those who travel.
Or am I the only one to have thought of that?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I know there's a lot of hype around these web-based office tools. But I'm not convinced that they offer any productivity benefits. As a manager, I don't want to be dropping $50 per employee on this, only to have it decrease their productivity.
Maybe someday these web-based office suites will be feature- and experience-comparable with OpenOffice.org or WordPerfect. But as far as I can tell, those days are a long way off.
I use the google apps at home, even though I have a licensed copy of office, cause I like to access it easily from work and home.. However, the one very limiting factor is the spreadsheets won't connect to databases. Lots of businesses have excel doing simple DB reporting, and this just won't work with the spreadsheet app. (yet??)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Is that really a fair comparison, though? Google's email is great, but their Spreadsheet and Word Processor solutions are nowhere near as sophisticated as MS Office. And in an office environment, many of those differences do matter.
I haven't played with Google Calendar enough, but would it be a workable replacement for the Outlook calendar? i.e. Can you schedule meetings with a simple invite rather than telling everyone to put it on their calendar? Can other users see your unavailable periods when scheduling?
I hate to give Microsoft props, but there are features that are critical to the office use of software. If Google doesn't provide those features, they will not be able to compete at all. Which means that the supposed "leverage" with Microsoft would be nothing more than hogwash.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Doesn't make it better.
;)
I really don't see google apps being a threat to office anytime soon. I used their spreadsheet program last night for the first time to plot some data for simple graph. The reason google apps is simple and easy to use is that it doesn't do much, like graphs and charts. Also preforming simple tasks can take a while for the the spreadsheet to update. Their are plenty of other options that are easy to use and easy to find both of Office and Open Office. I just don't see the reason to pay 50 bucks for this. It's only a competitive price if your offering a competitive product.
Of course if I'm wring about the charts etc I'm sure you all will let me know. Thanks in advance
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
All the Google products are nice as far as they go, but I can't see how they can replace full-featured apps like Office and Exchange in the "enterprise". Maybe for personal and mom-pop business, but can they do what most major businesses need? I don't think so. Yet.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why? One simple reason, if I use an MS solution I am the sole caretaker and gatekeeper of my data and information. If I use Google they have everything and can and will copy and use it to their benefit, and perhaps your competitors benefit.
From a marketing standpoint, this initially looks to be pretty strong. Google is hitting the white space, but I still have to question it - is the white space there because nobody moved into it or is there because it represents a non-viable product mix?
I once heard networking defined as being in a room, having your data located 200 feet down the hallway and believing that it is a good thing. I think the ASP model is flawed in providing the needs for large organizations. There are issues surrounding security of data and uptime availability that probably outweigh the cost savings. Security is huge, especially given Google's stated mission to make ALL information available to the world. Do I want to give them my confidential sales information? Not.
The cost savings isn't what its cracked up to be either, since the cost is $50 per employee, per year. It seems like Microsoft is about 4-5 years between major releases, so your cost is $200-$250 per seat for 4-5 years.
Overall, I'll pass for now.
Um...it was fun to play with while it was free. $50/year for these toys is a bit much.
My company has been interested in Google Apps for a while, but we won't touch it until we can buy an Google Apps appliance machine and install it in our own facility.
We're not holding our breath.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
"What we see in the Google Apps is a real focus on making them easy to use and intuitive," she said. "And that's something that Microsoft has been unable to do in all of its years with Office."
It's easy to make something easy and intuitive when they have almost no capability. Let's see Google make it a lot easier and intuitive AND have the same functionality.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
One of the major things that prevents us from going Gmail is the lack of imap support. I can't force my users to give up whatever email app they currently like. Gmail is a great product, but without some flexibility there, it can't catch on where IT does not have an iron grip, especially at the executive level.
:)
PS Pop is -not- Imap.
..... A few chairs will go flying in Redmond over this.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Why would a company entrust Google with all their corporate emails, and many of their files as well?
Make a difference: move to a swing state.
The people that really need to watch out are Lotus. I've been admining a Domino server for about 8 years now and let me tell you, it's the second biggest pain in the ass that I have to deal with. Google's solution would fully replace Lotus for all the things we use it for and actually do it better.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I like the idea of a local appliance, and indeed, G already offers one for their search engine. I wouldn't be suprised if they do the same for the office tools eventually. But the icing on the cake would be a local appliance that not only keeps local copies of everything, but also backs it up in somewhat real time to G.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Great, just what the working world needs, more useless web-based apps. Lose internet connectivity, and it all goes to
even further waste. with a standalone PC, and email stored locally, or on a locally-controlled server, if the bloody net goes down, I can still access archived email, try that with gmail.
Same goes for the so called gmail-spreadsheets, I have yet to see even excel crash due to a faulty net connection, or worse a java-interpreter error.
Just another excuse for Microsoft to lower, than increase pricing.
if i pay for the premier edition of google apps, does google
1) get rid of the advertising?
2) stop its fishy behavior related to data retention, such as holding on to your emails even after you've deleted them?
3) offer full time SSL for the email?
For what you get, and for everything that you *don't* have to buy, that's idiotically cheap.
Back when we where considering going from Exchange 5.5 to 2003 ( a huge pain in the butt ) I considered moving us to an online alternative. intranets.com now WebOffice ( webex umbrella ) provided somewhat of an alternative at that point. Now they are even better that they offer email hosting, with your domain not "gmail.com".
Several factors stopped me from being able to make that jump.
1) Legacy...everyone was using Exchange and we had tons of email in it that would be a pain to copy into folders.
2) Regulation. How does google keep all company emails in one place that can be archived and backed up. I'm sure Google won't loose someone's email anytime soon ( less likely then us ), but how do you document their backup procedures.
3) Current email addresses. No one wanted to give them up.
4) Internet bandwidth and reliance. People tend to think of the internet like electricity, but we are not there yet. It is funny that I get a faster connection at my house with a cable modem then our dual t1s provide...and a lot cheaper. This is another post, but unless you are in a big data center getting a decent sized pipe at a reasonable price is still overpriced.
5) Gateway level controls. We wanted to see every email that came in. We run a spam firewall, but if it blocks errantly we have a log. If Google blocks and email?
6) Customer support emails. We have tons of email addresses for our clients/etc that would probably be a pain to setup.
7) Fax support. We have to integrate with a fax server...yep it sucks.
8) Public folders ( ie email boxes accessible by more then one person )...ties in with 6.
To name a few.
If I was starting up a small software company I'd be all over this. As far as for enterprise uses...I think Google has a long road ahead of them...but they are speeding car.
By using Linux (FREE), you get a full office suite FOR FREE, you get an E-Mail Server FOR FREE, you can host your internal and external web sites on a Web Server FOR FREE...
With only the cost of maintaining the system (minimal, for smaller companies)...the cost is much reduced...only $25 a year per domain at dyndns.org...
--E--
Google Documents is still very much in it's infancy as well, and not at all ready for wide-spread business use. I was stunned when i tried it out last week that there are a ton of warnings when trying to do something as simple as Find and Replace.
Among other things, that very basic and relied-upon feature is listed as "Experimental," it doesn't offer a "Replace" option, but only a "Replace All" and it is not able to be Un-Done.
That told me volumes about just how far this application has to go.
Just because it's by far the best web-based document editor in existence doesn't mean it's ready to compete head to head with Word.
I think it's great for personal use, especially for people like me who use GMail, but it's just not something I'd be ready to run a business on.
and you would overhear many MS employees' lunch meetings around here. As early as 3-4 years ago, there was a lot of buzz about starting projects like what Google's doing now. The "Live" initiative will supposedly eventually convince people to submit micro-payments to use Office products. ($0.25 per Word doc creation, $0.50 per printing, etc.) The MS people who were talking about this acted like it was the best thing since sliced bread and that it will cure cancer. It'll probably be deployed around 2015.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
People are a bit confused. You can use everything there for free right now. The main benefit you get for $50/year is support, and larger mail boxes, plus some API options for tapping into the system.
This is helpful especially for small to medium sized businesses (the bulk of all businesses and over half of all employees outside of government are small to medium sized). This is also useful for orgs with employees traveling or off site most of the time.
So, to say it another way. Google offers for FREE right now. google for Domains which gives you free gmail (2gb per email), gdocs, calendar, and chat. Plus a portal page that the company admins can control, and has feeds of email and calendar.
Not a perfect solution by any means, as many have already mentioned, but you don't have to pay $50 a year for it. Only pay that if you want all the extra stuff on top of that.
Given the pervasive ues of powerpoint to present data, why would any business want to forgo this functionality?
This almost makes the Microsoft solution seem reasonable: "By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange".
.6% of your average office user's salary? And not that I'm a fan of Microsoft or anything, but I have to admit that Office and Exchange are pretty featureful. And lets face it, even if half the employees don't utilize the features, there's always a handful who need the advanced features of Excel or Word. You could pay the hefty per-user licensing and have a few people using Office and everyone else using Google apps, but then you have the ol' document interchange problem. Every now and then, a non-Office user needs to open some ridiculously complex spreadsheet sent by the CFO or whatever. Google certainly isn't going to handle it. Or you coudl just get a site license and not worry about it at all. Microsoft Word may be overkill, but so what? How many people these days can't open up Word and write up a simple document?
Well shoot, is that all? Sounds like a deal to me. That is, what, about
Of course, OpenOffice is another option, which is still, in my opinion MUCH more featureful than Google apps. Lets face it, businesses really do need the features.
Google is following the same old tired fallacy which states that "all you have to do is implement the 10% of functionality that 80% of people use, and you have a Microsoft killer." Just because it is Google and it is web based, doesn't mean it is any more of a challenge to Microsoft.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Google is using Microsoft's own tactic against them--use one strong revenue stream to subsidize aggressive underselling in another. Almost all of Microsoft's profit comes from their Windows/Office/Exchange product lines--they then use this profit to offset heavy losses as they attack new markets (like--Internet advertising). Google is simply executing the reverse--using their strong ad revenue to subsidize an attack on Microsoft's office turf. Even if few companies actually sign on with Google, they're all going to use Google's offering to negotiate lower pricing with Microsoft, thereby hurting a key revenue stream--mission accomplished.
Microsoft's battle against GO Penpoint is instructive because it's well documented from both sides. The GO side is covered in the famous book Startup, and the Microsoft side is covered in the book Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. In that book the GO chapter ends with the death of Microsoft Pen Windows and a revelation from one of the managers--that the goal was not to sell Pen Windows, but simply to block GO's success in the marketplace---"Block the kick," not score the touchdown.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
ZDNet UK's got a video interview with Google about Web Apps Premier. In it Google's European enterprise director, Roberto Solimene, promises that the product offers 'seamless integration' between the various applications. He also claims that Google's "hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide" will help it compete against Microsoft.
You can see it here.
This is the real killer, in my opinion. If Google can makes their apps platform independent, then Microsoft doesn't just have to worry about lost Office sales, but lost Windows sales as well. If all your needs can be satisfied by a combination of free software AND a low-cost office suite, then MS is in trouble.
Granted, too many buried up to their neck in MS solutions. But for new, small companies starting out, with modest needs? The list of reasons that one must stick to Microsoft just shrunk noticeably.
I think this offering will be a disaster. It's not ready for primetime and Office 2007 is lightyears ahead of everything else for business apps. A linux server is cheaper, on functionality and security MS is far superior. There's no middle market here.
In this day and age of lawsuits and corporate rules and regulations I can't see any large company using hosted services where their data resides on other servers. That would open up a whole can of legal problems, especially if that data was compromised. Another example is say that Google kept backup tapes for 10 years, but company was policy was no backups for more than 6 months. A lawsuit comes along and the lawyer for the other side realizes you use Google and subpoeanas the backup tapes from Google and finds the evidence they want.
A couple of points:
- Even in large corporations there are different groups of users and some of those groups can *really* use a nice cheap lightweight corporate portal thingy with email & etc. Consider cable installers or repair technicians or any group of otherwise smart folks who aren't in an office all the time but also don't travel in airplanes as a primary part of their job.
- There are other really useful features that google can integrate into this offering that will make it stickier in the corporate market. Three immediately come to mind:
* wikis
* message boards
* project management tools (like basecamp)
maybe this is too specific, but I can't keep files on servers that aren't owned by my company. I am doing gov't contract work, and my company is required by law to be responsible for the security. Google apps would be great, but only if there were a box we could own that we could keep in a locked room and be responsible for it.
Here is where they just FAIL trapped in the warp of their own success not knowing the failure that waits for them behind the next door.
I like google, gmail, etc, etc., etc..
All I wanted was to get some extra space in my inbox since the free space isnt' enough for me..
To use this service you need to have a domain name...
I own serveral but I don't want my email @ my domain name
All of that is a minor point, just well something that I want...
Here is why they fail...
I can't contact them... there isn't an easy simple way to reach them and find out if there is an alternative..
When you click through into their help system you get into page after page of "try this and try that..."
It's one thing to offer free stuff for FREE and skimp on the help...
When your trying to sell something.. you need to be able to help people...
Not that my problem is such a big deal, but each group of people signing up will have their own problems, and the biggest one is that they can't get anyone on the phone or in email, without jumping through so many hoops, pages, forms and FAQs that well, it's like talking to a wall...
http://www.hawknest.com/
Where did the $225 per user per year come from? MS office (in qty) costs about $150; assume a 3 year usage... that's only $50 a year. I don't see google replacing MS office in corporate environment.
found the advantages of a word processor over a simple text editor, I doubt anything anyone can say will change your mind.
gMail is pop. As slick as the interface is, I really like working with IMAP or even Exchange servers. It is nice for all of my devices to be in sync. I hate checking email on my phone, then getting back to gMail and everything I did is (to some extent) lost.
If gMail implements IMAP, *THEN* they will have a much more competitive offereing, at least on the email side of things.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Say you have an employee and pay them $50k a year.
They work 11 months of the year and 20 days for each of those 11 months, so 220 days a year.
So that works out at about $227 a day - which excluding the $50 you'd have to pay google, is about the same as what you're paying MS
Sooo if over a whole year, the switch from MS -> Google lost over 7.5 hours productivity, you've made a loss.
Now comparing the two solutions, it would appear that you're going to lose a whole load more than a single day a year in productivity - especially over the switch.
lower paid your employees, the less the switch is going to hurt - hence the emphasis on 'people normally not given computers/access'
Will the pay version of gmail still serve me ads? I'd pay $50/year for the ad-less gmail alone.
Next?
Face it, compared to IMAP, all webmail sucks, even Gmail. So far, there is no IMAP access to Gmail. My university considered moving mail to Gmail, but lack of IMAP access is a deal killer.
Welcome back to 1975, where mainframes and 'pay as you go' computing ruled the day.
The Personal Computer, if google/microsoft have their way, will cease to exist. Welcome back the dumb terminal.
Let google/microsoft store all your data, for a low monthly fee.
Use all your favorite applications, for a low monthly fee.
It's the old micropayment bullshit, disguised as a new 'pay as you go' initiative. Same shit, different smell.
1975 called, it wants its 'micropayment' system back.
Thanks for describing Sharepoint, which does everything you and others responders described and more.
On feature checklists, perhaps. In reality, no. It claims to have revisions and "document lifecycle management" and all that, but it works like shit.
This is an important point, and it's not just for groups doing government / classified work. What if Apple had all of it's development effort for the iPhone on google apps, the opportunity for industrial espionage would be enormous.
Even at home, whenever I pay bills I create a spreadsheet - this helps me see how I am doing and it gives me a single sheet to refer to when I want to see if I have actually paid a bill. It contains account numbers. My finances are my own business and should not be available to others.
It all sums up in the old saw.. "No security without physical security" If my data is on a machine I don't own, I no longer own my data.
(this also goes for a machine that I own but that can be "turned off" by a remote entity. but that's another post..)
Ummm. Aren't Verizon and Sprint's networks considered 3G? They have both deployed EV-DO networks that are considered 3G. Cingular is launching their HSDPA right now. HSDPA is considered 3.5G. Where do you live in the US that you are not near a Sprint, Verizon, or Cingular network?
What has been nice for Sprint is that they have been able to re-use their spectrum for each upgrade without having to purchase more spectrum or shift things around. Europe's networks have adopted their own flavor of CDMA. This is a testament to Qualcomm's solid idea. Sprint must be given some credit to taking a risk in the early days and using an unproven idea. It has sure payed off.
Sprint also has announced that they are working on going with 802.16 for their next generation network. I do not know how far along they are, but I am pretty sure it's more than just talk. They have always had a competitive data network and I'm sure they want to stay competitive.
So yes, the road warriors in the US *can* use things like Google Apps. The bandwidth *is* there and getting better and better.
What will make or break this service is support. Companies consider support to be the main reason to choose product A over product B. This is why open source is not widely used in commercial enterprises. Once there is support, companies will choose it.
Visit http://www.kaizenlog.com
"functionality and security MS is far superior."
What are you smoking, and why haven't you sent us any?
i am a soviet space shuttle
Funny how the write up contained 3 links and none of them pointed to the actual application.
o ns.html
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editi
So the differences between the standard (free) version and the premier version are:
99.9% uptime guarantee for email
10 GB Email storage vs 2 GB
No text-based ads alongside email
Shared calendar resources
APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure
- Single sign-on
- User provisioning and management
- Support for email gateway
Email migration tools
24/7 assistance, including phone support
3rd party applications and services
ok so now instead of your boss maybe reading your e-mails you have someone you dont even know reading them at googles?
I'm not o.k with plaxo hosting my contacts and sure as hell will never host all my e-mails at google even though, supposedly, they do no evil.
Like OMG! Do you really? You use like an uber-1337 text editor AND a typesetter just for simple tasks. Wow, you are like the totally coolest nerd I've seen *ever*. I'd totally wish I was you if you weren't an arrogant twat trying to derive self-worth by showing everyone on a website just how too-cool-for-the-room your text-editor is. Like WOW, I'll bet you get laid all the time when chicks see that you use VIM instead of Word.
Time wasting is easily achieved with or without any particular piece of technology. Once people played wastepaper basketball in the office to waste time, we've just made it hi-tech
Quite the contrary. Lotus Sametime (chat) is the primary means of communication in our office. Phone is rarely used in-house and e-mail is for more 'official' communications or things which the sending party wants a record of.
On another note, my wife and I are using gmail for domains and I'm finding a very high occurence of my mail getting 'bounced' from servers or simply >dev/nulled. When I was mailing from the provider that hosted the domain this didn't happen, but now the mx records point to google I can't even send an e-mail from home to my own office!
It's bad enough for me, but the fact that my wife's e-mail is also getting lost is proving extremely problematic for me.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
No, ladies and gentlemen, not lack of trust of Google (I do trust them, strangely enough).
Lack of trust to the USA gouverment.
I consider Googles idea a good one - but with one flaw: you place all your data on the net.
You think that's okay? It's not, and I'll give you an example why:
Recently, two kids (16 and 17 years) photographed themselves while having sex. Then she sent the pictures from her PC to his PC, via email. Nothing else - a single email, no info to anybody else.
The state brought them to court: producing and distributing child pornography.
Not only is the idea behind this absolutely ridiculous (but we're used to hearing things like this from the US), but the state refused to say where they got that data from.
You can't tell me that they were sniffing the two kids PC because, well, they were expected to be terrorists. Thus we can assume that they scan data over the net. Probably yours, too. Would you trust your [company|private business] data to your state?
I wouldn't.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I actually USE Google Apps for Your Domain (got in on the beta) and I don't recall seeing anything in the agreement giving Google the right to look at your data. So how exactly can anyone look at it without the law being broken?
Office is full of security holes, by the way. You did hear about the Excel bug floating around, right? and the bug that even affects the Mac version of Office that makes it possible to do Bad Things (tm) to computers via exploitation of the hole?
But Google Apps, if you're not accessing it with IE (which sadly too many people blindly do, even though it's full of holes too) isn't going to have those problems.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Has anyone written "Dubya sux" or "terrorist's rule" 5000 times in Google Apps? What happened?
I have signed up for the beta too, and while they do not affirmatively state that they will use your information for whatevery the hell they feel like, they only privacy they offer is limited protection in relation to third party disclosures. I like the last part of this snippet, in giving you the opportunity...
"Information you provide - When you sign up for a Google Account ... We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information..."
It wasn't my intention to ignore the well known holes in MS, and clearly any webapps it offers are more targetted and vunerable, but one can take many MS apps offline, avoiding network transmissions and third party access.
It appears that someone has partnered with Google to create an entire domain space for Google Apps for Your domains. You can go to http://www.imallabout.com/ to see the entire list of domain names for sports and leisure enthusiast. I have signed up for an ImAllAboutGolf.com account and all of the services are coming from Google so hopefully there will not be reliability problems.
The key is the API. I have been using Google Apps for over 6 month now and its pretty cool. But there have been some outspoken critics about it.
t e/pressroom/pressreleases/2007/pr-070222.htm
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4537
But it does definitely have the potential of shifting the market. The key for this is (on old Google tradition) the ability to integrate over the net. Big companies like Avaya will ad tremendous value to Google Apps.
http://www.avaya.com/gcm/master-usa/en-us/corpora
We are currently working on an open source "business application platform" (think salesforce.com). Its working right now with Google Apps but we are obviously thinking of integrating it with other open source products like OpenExchange etc... We are just doing our first beta. if you are interested let me know.
http://www.applicationexchange.com/