Slashdot Mirror
Google Apps Premier Edition Launches, Widely Used
Tookis writes "Google's online productivity suite (Google Apps) has already replaced Microsoft products at more than 100,000 small to medium enterprises. Additionally, it's been deployed for serious work-related projects at two of the largest companies in the world. Product manager for Google Enterprise Kevin Gough was quick to point out that although the premier edition of Google Apps only just launched, it's already been adopted by companies like GE, Procter & Gamble, Prudential and Loreal. He goes on to describe the role of Apps: to augment, not necessarily replace existing IT solutions. Just the same, he says, the role of Apps can be powerful where traditional services may be too expensive. Says Gough, 'There's a large segment that's under-served by today's productivity tools. Production workers and retail employees for instance. 48% of all employees actually don't even have an email address. That's because the cost of hardware, software and maintenance has made it prohibitively expensive to provide email to employees.'"
Somehow, I'm having issue believing that number. 100,000? Maybe 100,000 companies have users that are using gmail accounts, but I just don't buy that 100,000 real businesses have switched over already, unless Jim-bob in his basement counts as a business...
I call bullshit on the 100,000 number. This has mediaHypeFUD written all over it.
GE, a government contractor, will not allow a 3rd-party to have any sort of access to project documentation. Neither will GM, BoA, or the rest of the fortune 1000.
Google apps has its place, but it is not in any "enterprise" i've ever worked in.
Website Hosting
Production workers and retail employees for instance. 48% of all employees actually don't even have an email address. That's because the cost of hardware, software and maintenance has made it prohibitively expensive to provide email to employees.
Or maybe, just maybe, 48% of all employees don't need email to get their jobs done. I know, it sounds heretical, but let's be honest, does K-Fed really need email to operate that McDonald's cash register? Nah, I didn't think so either.
Why would you want your retail employees to have email? Is it really necessary for the cashier at Wal*Mart to have their own email address when they're probably only going to work there for a few months?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Can't wait to see what happens when the 1st security breach happens and companies that THOUGHT they were storing their documents online safely, actually find their documents floating across the internet. Will kind of put a damper on this whole online storage thing. Think hackers aren't gonna sink their teeth into this????
Bottom line, real companies don't want their confidential documents floating around willy-nilly in the "cloud". And to have 2 systems (one desktop based for confidential, and "cloud" based for non-confidential) is just too much hastle to have to remember and maintain.
Let us take for example the vendor lock and switching costs. You can get decent oil change for your car for 20$. 10$ if you really clip coupons and are willing to let Joe's QuickLube to do it. And most car dealers charge 30$ for the very same service. Still there are millions of car owners who would happily pay 30$ to the dealer willingly.
Now take a look at how difficult it is to use a competing product instead of Microsoft. The switching costs are high and there is very heavy vendor lock. In 5 years, the marketplace might become more level. Finally the corporations might start demanding true interoperability. MS might lose market share. From 90% share in Office and 80-85% share in browsers and 95% share in computers, it might go down. How low will it go, I cant guess. May be to 50%. May be to 33%. The profitability also might suffer. But after all is said and done, MS will still have decent market share and a decent profit making business. Look around, IBM is still around, isn't it? It was the IBM dinosaur around which nimble Microsoft ran circles around. 10 years from now there will be three dinosaurs, IBM, MSFT and GOOG. And there will be another nimble player.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm employed in a company that switched to Google Apps for Domains, and it works great. But it replaces our old e-mail service.
The calendar part is getting better and better, especially the arrival of syncmycal has improved integration with MS Outlook, but it surely doesn't replace it, yet, because Google Calendar cannot sync with everything, yet.
We're looking forward to use docs and spreadsheets, but it's still just an add-on to our existing in-house software.
It would be great if the terminal was just a browser, but to all intents and purposes you need a PC, running an OS to get a browser. That surely is a large part of the cost/management/security overhead. If we could have a 'hardware' browser only terminal then we are back to client/server. But wait a minute didn't Sun and to a lesser extend DEC with the VT1000 try this before ?
Ian
Google's online productivity suite (Google Apps) has already replaced Microsoft products at more than 100,000 small to medium enterprises.
Uh, replaced? I seriously doubt that 100,000 companies are now exclusively using Google Apps. I seriously doubt that 100,000 companies even deployed Google Apps company-wide. I'd be astounded if that statistic was anything more than someone looking at the weblogs for Google Apps, seeing 100,000 unique .com domains, and concluding they had 100,000 companies using their product. It's probably one or two people at each company, logging in from work to their gmail account, and working on their resume in Google Apps.
Check out this cheesy bit of spin:
Additionally, it's been deployed for serious work-related projects at two of the largest companies in the world.
That's a relief. The industry was worried it was being used for managing the office football pool.
Please help metamoderate.
You Linux freaks can foam at the mouth trying to convince anyone that Linux + open office will be widely adopted by corporates. People that actually work in corporates and support infrastructure, will never let that amateur junk in.
Some of us linux freaks don't care whether corporates adopt it or not. I'm a little curious about the source of your hostility though.. what did oss do to get your panties in such a bunch?
Google Apps seems like a really great idea for Universities. We spend SO much money on MS Office and related products.
Umm...why didn't you install OpenOffice?
Please help metamoderate.
This service has been available (in beta, for free) for probably a year now, so [Google] aren't claiming that 100, 000 companies switched in a day.
I use LaTeX for pretty much all my document needs so I don't have a real vested interest in OpenOffice.org vs. MS Office, but it really isn't fair to call OO amateur. It did start life as a commerical product. And is the opposite of commercial really amateur? gcc is not a commercial compiler, but it certainly not amateur and has been used in lots of serious situations.
Sadly, not much have happned on the usability front comparing the average form based input page and the 3270 terminal system anon. 1972. Chances are that people is going to be fed up with subpar performacne and cluncky interfaces and head back to the "fat client".
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
Dear Clueless,
How much does it cost for direct telephone support for all those OpenOffice users? How much does it cost to run e-mail servers for them? How much does it cost for disk space and maintaining redundant backups of the disk? How much does it cost to administer the calendar, e-mail, IM, file, and backup servers? How many students are willing to wipe their macs in order to install Linux and get a reasonable version of OpenOffice? Who will be providing support for the installation of OpenOffice on all those home machines as well as providing a mechanism for transporting the user's files between the two systems and keeping them synched?
Get a fucking clue.Aside from learning some basic courtesy, make you should learn to think through what all is being provided by Google here and how hard it would actually be to replicate all that functionality in a university setting. There are a lot of cases where OpenOffice is a much, much better solution than Google Docs. At our business, for example, we would not let our documents and communication all run, unencrypted to a third party. We would not relinquish so much control of the functions handled by our servers. For the education sector, however, Google seems to be offering a lot of real advantages over OpenOffice at this time.
Half of all employees don't have email? I'm thinking if they've made it this far along without it, they probably don't need it...
:)
Does the checkout girl at the grocery store need email?
How about the house painter?
Or the guy that tears tickets in half at the movie theater?
Is that the target market? I'm sure Microsoft is quaking in their boots about the prospect that they missed out on getting McDonalds to shell out for Exchange licenses for all their employees...
I used it first time and you can't even plot a graph. Why would someone use this?
"Browser based stuff looks good in comparison to what's generally available for Windows so people assume it is a step forward instead of the step sideways that it appears to be to me."
Browser apps look better than most Windows apps? What are you smoking? X applications are hardly the benchmark for GUI quality either.
A shame for whom? Ease of use to lessen training costs, simplicity without needing specified hardware, and a vast majority of workers whose interfacing with a computer consists of MySpace, Email, and chat. Technologically it could be considered a step sideways, but so was the Wii. It's all about user interactivity.
it's complete and absolute BS for one reason only: SOX compliance. Anyone running their business off of google apps is just begging to be run out of business by the government. There is absolutely no way, with the way google runs their apps, that you could ever meet security or retention requirements for SOX compliance.
This is exactly the point I was trying to allude to in an earlier post I made when I mentioned Excel's formula language. In any large enough organization, there is likely enough business intelligence coded into Excel spreadsheets by people who no longer work there that trying to convert all of it onto another platform would be ridiculous.
I've seen the argument that a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet, and if you're starting from scratch, I think that is true. But a Google spreadsheet is not the same as a 20 page, fully formulated, linked to external datasources (via ODBC, SQL on the backend anyone?) Excel monster. And speaking of which, what do you do if you're using Google apps and you want to link to external data in say, an SQL server? Excel has great built in wizards that will link to just about any data source imaginable. Is Google going to port all of my financial data over there for me so that I can "access it from anywhere?"
2. I can see your point that Google apps may not be compatible with SOX, but this would matter only to publicly traded companies.
3. You haven't been paying attention to the news. I've seen multiple stories about SOX causing many small publicly traded companies to delist from the stock market and go private, and how it's causing businesses to skip the US stock markets when it comes time for them to do their IPO. In other words, yes, there's a general feeling that SOX is driving business away from the US. Here's an example article I found through a very quick search: Is SOX Driving Small Companies Overseas?
SOX seems to be too onerous on most companies, and only the largest ones can properly put up the effort to meet its requirements. I'm not an expert, so I'm going by what I've read and heard on the news, and by the huge amount of IT changes that SOX has caused at my work. I'm as anti-corporate as they come, and I can see that SOX is having some negative effects. I think he's right that something is going to change.