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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...?
As well the loss of mail merge style features in Doc (people are still calling it writely??).
I never really expect to see full macro capabilities, but a simple mail merge, even from google speadsheet would be nice.
being able to access your data and apps anywhere is just as useful when your laptop gets stolen.
In the en it is a mixed bag. Somethings will require local data. Other times i really miss having everything on the network. Finding a balance between the two will be the best bet.
Besides a corporation or government who gives their employees data to take home is just asking for trouble. How much of ten's of thousands of customer personal data has been lost your way?
I just am tired of waiting for corporations to stand up and upgrade their networks to even present standards. the USA doesn't even have 3G yet Japan and europe are working on going beyond that.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
This is still a problem, but we're getting increasingly close to a world where you can go pretty much anywhere and still have net access. Converting an entire business with a lot of travelling employees to Google Apps instead of traditional apps that will work on a non-networked PC is probably still premature, but there may be businesses who don't rely as much on travel that might give it a try.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
Google calendar is pretty decent. It's main drawback is the lack of an easy way to sync to your cell/pda, but i'm sure they'll provide a mobile client that will reduce that need.
I've done some stuff with Google Spreadsheet and it's surprisingly useful. Sure it doesn't support all the power features of excel, but when you need to throw together a simple sheet (particularly if it involves collaboration between individuals) it works surprisingly well.
I'd love to see some analysis about which excel features actually get used. I think PivotTables are fantastic, but I'd be surprised if 5% of the installs of excel have ever been used to make or view one.
The only big drawback I see is latency. If I want to insert a row then that needs a server hit, and it's noticable. The real value for these apps will be when google can supply a $2000 appliance that runs them locally but keeps all the documents backed up off site.
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.
Depends. Back in the day (when the bartenders at the US Air Club knew my name AND what my preferred drink was), I rarely did work on an airplane. Why? Not because I didn't have work to do, but because I viewed the couple of hours of quiet time as a chance to relax and read a good book.
I have seen dozens of people pounding away on their keyboards on different flights and I have always wondered how is those people were so unproductive that they couldn't get their work done during normal work hours. Then, I turned to the flight attendant and asked him/her to re-fill my scotch.
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Or the fact that, currently, Writely doesn't even have the most basic functionality like utilizing the INSERT key on the keyboard?
Sorry, but it's not going to replace any Microsoft Office product until the program works like *every other* word process on the most basic level.
For what you get, and for everything that you *don't* have to buy, that's idiotically cheap.
> Great, just what the working world needs, more useless web-based apps. Lose internet connectivity, and it all goes to
> even further waste.
Think ahead. The same could have been said when people moved from mechanical typewriters to electrical typewriters. Today you simply don't expect power outages for hours. The internet will move into that direction simply because it is indispensable for more and more companies.
That's not necessary, is it? The company could have its own SQL server requiring a username and password that the google app could connect to and present the results in whatever way they want. And besides, Google isn't going to start being a free database host, that's just crazy! It wouldn't be feasible.
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.
Agreed about OO.org. I use the "standard" edition of Google Apps which does offer for free the use of Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Docs is horribly uninteresting. FCKEditor has more formatting options than Google Docs. It's not an office competitor in my mind.
Spreadsheets is a bit better, but 2G is plenty of email space for my small business.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Some businesses don't have an IT person to set it all up and smaller businesses have a MCP (or less) who is clueless about Linux. Then there is administration, security issues, etc... In the end the TOC is much less using Google. There are other posts which outline the flaws in using google, but it really just depends on the needs of the company. It isn't even close to enterprise worthy, but most businesses are small not enterprise.
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.
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)
Yes this stuff is obviously not going to be as good as a full MS Office install. That doesn't really matter though, because this clearly isn't intended to be an Office "killer" or whatever you want to call it. Google is going after the low hanging fruit - people who have relatively simple needs and would prefer a cheap option, particularly one that has the benefits of offsite backup and accessibility from everywhere. That's not everyone, indeed it is a small market segment, so its hardly going to put a dent in MS Office's market share. On the other hand it is, aparently, a big enough market segment that Google thinks they cna make money at it - and I would tend to agree with them. MS Office is overkill for a lot of small companies, and those same companies tend to be the ones that are less inclined to have full time IT staff to manage file servers, backups, and so on. Just because the product isn't perfect for everyone doesn't mean there isn't a market big enough to exploit. Not everything has to be about total market domination.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I still haven't found the niche a word processor is supposed to fill. I write one 1,000-3,000 word article a week, various letters, and am in the middle of writing a book. None of these seem to require a word processor. I've tried using one a few times, and watched my productivity plummet. Perhaps you could enlighten me as to their use?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
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/
$200 a year is minimal if you are paying a (an extremely cheap) meatbag $35,000 a year. Any attempt at reducing the $200 has to be guaranteed to have only positive effects on productivity.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A few hundred bucks for software is nothing compared with having to hire an admin to take care of the stuff. Unless you have a good sized company with an existing IT staff, outsourcing this stuff is generally the safest and cheapest way to go.
I don't respond to AC's.