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Google Apps Slow to Replace Competition
ericatcw brings us a Computerworld article about how businesses are still hesitant to switch to Google Apps as an alternative to Microsoft Office. While a Google spokesman claims "millions of active users", only "several thousand organizations" have paid for the Premier service, which was launched earlier this year. From Computerworld:
"'If we deploy it correctly, Google Docs can replace some [of] our Office apps -- but not all of them,' said Les Sease, IT director of Prudential Carolina Real Estate in North Charleston, South Carolina. Sease would like to switch everyone over completely to Google Apps. But first he would like to see better synchronization between Google Apps and mobile devices, shared online file storage similar to that of Apple Inc.'s .Mac, as well as a simple desktop publishing tool similar to Microsoft Publisher."
Google Apps could disappear at any time. If you're gonna switch to something, switch to Open Office. Even if everyone in the project is suddenly killed by ninjas, you still have the original offline installer that can keep you going for quite some time.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Small company. We're certainly not turning in our copies of office, but google apps are great for a lot of the tasks where we need to collaborate. With no full time IT staff setting up something like sharepoint or even using groove is too much hassle.
As far as they are concerned they are only in competition with online Office Apps.
wink,wink.
Too many of us are weary of loosing are data to the wild. However, I am not averse to uploading something to DOCs that was composed offline, to be picked up at the conference. Laptop, USB Key, Google Docs. Gmail. All bases covered.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
A UI based in JavaScript or even pure HTML is horridly inefficient. Browsers' rendering engines are designed to quickly translate markup/scripting, not render screen elements most efficiently. The browser is another hoop code must jump through before its result is presented to the user. I can't even use the JS-based GMail on my 200 mhz Pentium because its fancy AJAX slows Firefox to a halt (Thunderbird runs just fine). GMail is even less responsive on my Xeon system compared to normal applications.
On an aside, I'm tired of sites relying more and more on AJAX and CSS to generate/render pages, as web-based applications must. Slashdot renders noticeably more slowly with its new CSS-based layout than its old primarily HTML-based layout.
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This doesn't surprise me, there are some practical issues with having all your office work done online, such as the fact that if your internet crashes, you can't do anything. On the other hand, people trying to deal with compatibility issues between operating systems probably enjoy this a lot more...
Our company is in the middle of switching to the Email/Calendar apps for domains. We anticipate it's going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than the labor costs of maintaining our own exim-based system, with much better quality of service to boot. It's also a fraction the cost of equivalent hosted solutions. So far we haven't found any missing features in the front or the backend; our company relies heavily on email, both internal and outgoing; if it can meet our needs, it can meet almost anyone's. Plus, the user interface of Gmail is just brilliant, and I anticipate the conversations feature, alone, will be a huge boost to productivity for our company. (This company sends about 10x as much email as any place I've ever worked.)
The online Doc/Spreadsheet/Presentation apps, though, I have absolutely no interest in. The features simply aren't there; neither is the responsiveness. OpenOffice will work just fine for us; I plan to push for a switch to that over the next year.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
my only experience w/ Google Docs was that it was slow. It is great for collaborative work over multiple locations. Having said that, I am queasy about having my data on someone else's servers.
I didn't even know this Google Apps Premier existed. Why does it exist? Google Apps is neat. It's cool to be able to look at an Excel attachment without having to download it. That's as far as it goes, though. Google Apps is much lighter on the features, is slower for me even on broadband, is inaccessible if you lose Internet access, and so on. And $50/year per user isn't cheap.
Google Apps is an impressive demo of what AJAX can do. Nothing more.
I've been dropping Google like a rotten sack of potatoes. It's done some things I haven't agreed with over time, automatically allowing someone's contact to see all of its shared feeds without any warning is one thing too many. Makes me wonder what other features of Google's might suddenly change without warning. This could be a reason why others have been slow to adopt its office offering.
I've already successfully moved away from its e-mail (instead using one I've set up for my own use). However does anyone have a good search engine alternative (not Yahoo considering they're willing to work with the Chinese government to send freedom-lovers to jail)?
I find the Collaboration, and historic persistence of spreadsheets very attractive.
...
I would point out that Google Docs could become legally binding as there is a mechanism to certify their content and date, and perhaps if Google adds identity verification like amazon's realid or so, on-line documents could replace paper docs - in business filings, contracts, perhaps even court filings.
I would advise Google to look for paper-intensive markets and provide the full cycle of services of the paper-world. Proof of service, by snail-mail if necessary, shredding, archiving, redlining. I would advise "templates" for document-intensive transactions such as buying/selling a house, car, small business, in which filing the document with the state agencies is part of the process.
The strength of the web is integrated services, not speed for a solo user. Google Docs should target a very specific niche - Wordperfect is still a favorite for lawyers (IIRC), Google should target collaboration-intensive markets, like education, conventions etc
I must say one problem seems to be an inability to link documents. One spreadsheet can't refer to another - can a powerpoint include a live graph linked to an online spreadsheet?
AIK
Don't get me wrong; I like the idea behind Google Apps, and with some work I think they could be a contender for MS Office and OO. However, they still need a lot of work. The "Word Processor" is nothing more than a basic html editor; its functionality is roughly on par with WordPad. The Presentation and Spreadsheet apps seem a bit farther along, but they still have a ways to go.
What I do like about it:
So it's got potential, IMO, and with some work it very well could be a contender. But it's not there yet. Google needs to stop, look harder at the functionality of the office suites already out there, and focus on enhancements to bring it up to date. Then in a year or two, they'll be in a better spot to compete with OO or MS Office.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
How long before systems built around concepts like OpenOffice.org Online become serious competition to Google Apps? I'd think this would be more the way to go for many businesses, as such a platform would grant them more direct control over the application environment and permit easier development of in-house extensions.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Disruptive innovations often start out underperforming the market leaders' products. This has happened time and time again in history. The classic example is Sony's transistor radios. When they first came out in the 1960s, they had poor sound volume, poor reception, and poor sound quality. But they did just fine for the teenagers who bought them in droves, because they teenagers didn't care about sound quality back then -- they cared about mobility!!! They wanted to listen to their rebel music away from their parents' reach, because their parents disapproved of the music.
It's exactly the same with Google Apps and Free Open Source Software and the OLPC XO. They all underperform Microsoft apps, but they appeal to a different crowd. No analysis of Google Apps or FOSS or the OLPC XO is on the right track without looking at one key question: who are the best customers of these technologies? If they are the same group as the market leader, then they will fail for exactly the same reason that Walt Mossberg doesn't like Ubuntu: he says that he reviews products for mainstream consumers, and FOSS is just now starting to get to feature parity with Microsoft products.
And yet, boatloads of people are starting to buy FOSS-powered products. Sure, they are much smaller boarts than the boatloads of people buying Microsoft products, but the point is that people are PAYING for FOSS goods and services.
The best example is Google search. Google "rents" Linux to us all 1/10th of a second at a time. Google sells advertising, and so they commoditize the compliment: web traffic. Google is more concerned with keeping the Internet Free and Open than they are concerned with what platform you use to browse the Internet, at least until Microsoft locks down the browser and blocks out Google, which they are trying to do with "LiveSearch" (an effort that is failing).
,
Bottom line: if you want to understand why FOSS and Google will beat Microsoft, look at the customers who are using their products. They are not Microsoft's customers. At least not yet. But tomorrow they will be.
Oh, and BTW, when was the last time you bought an RCA product? What about a Sony product? Yet when Sony was young, it was mocked as "cheap Japanese crap." Think of that next time someone mocks Google Apps.
I use Gmail, but as some others have stated, it seems to be getting slower and slower to load with all the features they've crammed into it.
Now I have found Google apps useful if someone sends me an excel file that needs to be converted to a CSV and uploaded to a database. I can do that without having to load Excel or even download the file to my computer. I can do everything right in the browser.
However, I have to always be online to use it. Sometimes I'm somewhere, like Barnes and Noble, where wifi isn't free. Same thing with my hotel the other night. They were having internet issues. If I had to rely on Google Apps I would have been screwed as I needed to make some last minute changes to a presentation.
I find it a useful repository for documents, etc. that I may need access to on another machine, but it's not going to replace MS Office and iWork anytime soon for me.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Msft has dominated desktop office apps for about two decades. So, of course, google is not going not put msft out of business overnight.
To me, millions of users, and thousands of organization paying for premium service; seems like amazing progress against a ruthless monopoly like msft.
If msft ever gets down to 75% of the office app market, then msft will not be able dictate "standards." I think that may be why msie8 is actually supposed to use real standards.
I converted a small office to google apps. The email server service is brilliant as is it's filtering, start page and UI. But the purported 'spreadsheet' functionality is utterly unusable imo.
For pete's sake, two HUNDRED MHz? I had a faster computer than that in 1996. You're not the typical user, or even in the ballpark.
The Pentium Pro peaked at 200MHz.
The Pentium peaked at 233MHz, but that chip was not released until June 2, 1997
The Pentium II debuted at 233MHz, on May 7, 1997.
By the way, for the original poster: For mere pocketchange, many, many "Socket 6" motherboards can be upgraded to 500MHz [or higher] with a K6-2 [or, in some instances, a K6-3]:
On the other hand, if you're running a Pentium Pro at 200MHz, then there was an upgrade part to 333MHz, called the "OverDrive"; here's a guy who appears to be selling one of them for $15.99:
Now as far as being the "typical" user, I've got some older Socket 6 motherboards [some of them Intel TX chipsets, others VIA chipsets] which, with 500MHz K6-2's, can still handle most of the stuff I throw at them, although, admittedly, AJAX, Flash, and Acrobat Reader can be a pain in some web pages [particularly in poorly coded pages, like the "New & Improved" Slashdot, which can produce some really awful hangs with its sloppy Javascript].
Personally, I've often thought that the Socket 6's potential for a five-fold [or, in some cases, greater than five-fold] increase in speeds [when upgrading from circa 100MHz, to circa 500MHz] was, dollar for dollar, the greatest value in the history of the Personal Computer.
To get the equivalent bang for the buck nowadays, there would need to be a roughly 3GHz motherboard on the market already, which, five or ten years from now, would be capable of an upgrade to 15GHz.
And I just don't see that happening.
About the most you might hope for is that some single-core motherboards could get upgraded to maybe quad or octal cores, but I kinda doubt you'll have much luck with that.
You're exceptionally lucky if a really outstanding board, like an older Tyan, is capable of upgrading from single-core to [merely] dual-core.
Being only technology right doesn't make money; just ask the people at DEC. Being able to accurately judge market transitions and seize on these transitions is what good companies do. Being two years early is just as bad as two years late. What I want to know is how Google gets a pass? If MS was hording that much data on its users the black helicopters would be all over the place on ./
BTW besides from TVs Sony is is still cheap Japanese crap. They can't make audio gear worth a squirt of piss.
So do many failed innovations.
"They laughed at Columbus. They also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
And then they grew up and bought home stereo systems. Their children meanwhile bought boomboxes. When they grew up, they too bought home stereo systems. Their children bought Walkmen... Lather, rinse, repeat. Right down to the iPod. (Which increasingly serves as a memory unit to transfer songs between the car stereo and... home stereo systems.)
All of that aside, Google is probably the biggest reason why Google Apps aren't being widely accepted - on the street they have the highly deserved repuation for bringing out feature incomplete applications, and then leaving them untouched (in "beta") for months at a time. When they do revisit them, it is often to add 'bling' rather than to add useful features or fix longstanding bugs.
What are the bandwidth requirements for a typical googleapps user? Since a user banging away at word/ppt/excel consumes no outbound bandwidth, how much would I need to plan for adding 50, 100, 500 users?
:: There is no light at the end of a tunnel. There is a tunnel after a tunnel : Thom Y.
Or using networked on-demand software to do the work many stand alone applications already do is one of the stupidest things one can do with a computer?
Privacy and security issues aside, this seems to me the classic "let's create an artificial demand for something nobody needs, then fill the apparent need with an apparent product".
Your response is a misdirection. The point that I am making here is that the mere fact that a product or service underperforms today is not always good evidence of its future performance. The point is to look at the product, its vendor, and how the vendor is positioning the product in the market. If the vendor does a good job of matching a product or a service to the proper customer base, they can succeed. The theory of disruptive innovation helps us answer a key question: how is it that so many great companies have failed?
Before Christensen, the answer was that management failed to follow the needs of their current customers. Christensen shifted the focus by helping to identify the relationship between great companies and emerging demographics. Google is a great company today because it saw that you don't try to sell Linux to the same customers who buy Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office the same way that Microsoft sells those products: in a desktop computer or notebook used by power users. At least not at first. Instead, rent Linux to them 1/10th of a second at a time.
My point exactly. At one time, steel production in North America was dominated by large integrated steel mills. They produced all types of steel, from rebar at the bottom, to sheet metal at the top. Then along came mini-mills. They used recycled steel, rather than raw ore, to create steel. But they were not able to produce blemish-free steel, no matter how hard they tried. So, rather than compete with the integrated mills for the production of the high margin sheet metal, they produced rebar, because surface blemished don't matter for rebar. Eventually, the mini-mills were able to produce rebar at prices that the integrated mills couldn't match, so the integrated mills exited the rebar market.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because rebar customers are disloyal, price-sensitive customers. But more and more mini-mills sprung up, and the price of rebar collapsed, as the mini-mills fought with each other over price. So the smart managers of the mini-mills focused on creating steel for angle iron, which requires slightly better surface quality than rebar, but still far less quality than structural steel or sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the angle iron market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because now angle iron customers had become disloyal, price-sensitive customers. Mini-mills turned to the production of angle iron by the droves, and the price of angle iron collapsed. So smart managers of the mini-mills turned to structural steel, which requires slightly better surface quality than angle iron, but far less than sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the structural steel market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
This time, their investors did not rejoice.
The pattern was becoming clear. Large, integrated mills had huge cost structures, and they could not compete with the mini-mills on price, but the mini-mills were showing no end to their ability to produce high quality steel out of low-grade raw materials. The big mills were hugely expensive, required huge labor pools to run. Not a single integrated mill has been built in North America since the mid-seventies as a result, and all the dominant integrated mills have closed.
Microsoft employs 70,000 people, and has a market capitalization of about $335 billion as of the market's close today. Google has a market capitalization of about $216 billion
Then, as now, kids want mobility. And they are price-sensitive customers who don't care where they get their music or what devices they play them on. Or how good the sound quality is. A Linux device will be just as good as a name-brand device with Microsoft Mobile on it.
I got rid of MS software completely about 6 month age and have been using Google Apps exclusively since then. Google Apps are improving, but are not ready to be a replacement yet. Ask this question again in about a year, and I think we will have a very interesting debate.
I'd be really curious to see numbers on the size/number of companies using Google Apps Premium vs. ones that have some kind of Sharepoint solution setup.
A bunch of people upthread have made the point that the cool part of Google Apps is more about collaboration than trying to be an 'Office Killer', and I tend to agree. Sharepoint in a lot of ways is MS's answer to that office worker collaboration question. (I've heard a lot of people bitch about earlier versions of Sharepoint, not so much the most recent, but I've barely touched it so I don't feel qualified to say if it's crap or not or how it does or doesn't stack up to Google's premium offering.)
Perhaps, perhaps not. I'm going to give them some + points simply because there was no link to myminicity.
I am surprised no one mentioned the sharing fiasco. What if Google decides one fine day that a Google Apps document I am sharing with my business partner is "shared" and therefore can be shared with anyone I have had a GTalk conversation with? (including my competition who had at one point expressed interest in buying my company)
Now it is merely mocked as "crap"
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
No, it is a response to your (false) implication that Google Apps are like the transistor radio - wildly sucessful because it filled it a niche market with little competition. I then go further and show how that 'sucess' is actually quite limited, as invariably the product is discarded for another as the customer ages.
ROTFLMAO. Google neither rents nor sells Linux - the OS of it's web applications are utterly irrelevant.
You have no fucking clue what you are talking about.
Here's a final "disruptive" thought for you: Google pay their engineers pretty average salaries. Microsoft could offer each of Google's phds double their salary, and suddenly Google's brainpower would be mostly gone overnight, unless they scrambled to match that. And with Microsoft's warchest, Google would lose this arms race eventually, not to mention the damage to their stock.
It just auto-saves every couple of minutes. Graphics don't have to be resent. So we're talking about some HTML of differing sizes depending on the length of the document. I'd hazard a guess at no more than those same people using medialess Internet, but you should probably contact Google for a really good estimate.
Put identity in the browser.
Late to post, but thought sharing my experience might be useful. I'm not a premium goog aps user, but we do use the free version for my latest start up. The idea was to try and outsource as much of our IT infrastructure to goog and maybe in the process, develop a goog-boutique niche.
Gmail works great, no question about it. The rest of the office apps, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. The biggest hurdle to its practical business use is really easy to fix. The problem is that goog aps doesn't let you share arbitrary file formats with other users. It's nice that goog aps recognizes (or attempts to) a lot different file formats, but it should at least allow users to upload and share formats it doesn't recognize. So to share, for example, a zip file, we're reduced to emailing it to colleagues. This is clearly a messy solution for a business.
That is, for the thing to work, it's gotta have some semblance of a file system, for god's sake.. What on earth are these googs thinking? I wonder.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The general consensus I hear is that Google Apps are not reliable - if your internet connection goes kaput so does your ability to work. For companies hesitant to switch, maybe Google should offer some sort of Google-Apps-in-a-Box server that one can just plug into one's intranet and have it begin serving Google apps immediately? The odds of the entire intranet going down is a lot lower than the external connection... and it also creates less unknowns for companies - mostly they have control over their own internal networks.
I use Goole Docs for spreadsheets and word processing files I need to have handy at all times, from any computer (mostly Macs, but also Linux and Windows). I think it's very convenient solution.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
You wish it was google boy!
Google search is good. 4GB gmail is good. Everything else sucks.
Google is afraid developers will go after its search engine. So, in their defence they first start to attack and go after every new idea in all domains outside google-search. The result is always bloated crap but it keeps their name in the news every day. But there is certainly 0% innovation. Just lots of cash.
The goog thing is that if you disable javascript, google ads disappear.
I was thrilled when they rolled out IMAP for gmail, but less thrilled when it would not work properly with Windows Mobile handhelds (which worked with my ancient UW-IMAP on FreeBSD..) -- messages with HTML bodies showed up as blank.
Meanwhile, a month or more later, its still not fixed even though Google acknowledges its broken. This leads me to two questions/conclusions -- did they even TEST it with anything, including the wildly popular (if not market leading) WM5 & 6 handhelds? IIRC the forums are also full of gripes from Apple Mail and iPhone users. And what can possibly be taking the "smartest company in the world" so long to fix it?
If non-responsive fixes and broken-out-the-door software is what we can expect for "free", I hate to say it, but I'd almost rather pay. MS stuff can suck pretty hard, but it generally works for some core set of features.
These arguments remind me of why everybody thought EMACS was so great -- don't run another program, just write tons of ELISP that EMACS already understands. Get your mail, news, IDE, file browser et al. in a single program. At some point, you're overusing the Web Browser. Why does everybody have their hate on for using separate, specialized programs to do various tasks? Last I checked, I can click on a .xls/.doc/.ppt link in my browser and have it open in *Office. I believe these programs also support document versioning. Agreed, modern computers can certainly handle gobs of JavaScript or Flash or what not, but that's just making excuses for inefficiency. I'd hate to see a 100 page document in a JavaScript word processor, or a workbook with multiple worksheets and lots of formulas in a JavaScript spreadsheet editor. Or are you going to tell me that it's great only for small documents? Too limited -- the fate of all inefficient programs.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
There are very simple forces in play here. 1) Desktop centric open computing (ala Microsoft model of computing) will not die off soon because most people hate and/or do not can't deal with change. 2) No one in their right mind would trust their mission critical data and/or trade secrets in the hands of a third party custodian given the current climate in IT security. Now you can bet that those modern day hippie kids with their iPods will continue to move away from present day computing models but don't expect this Google apps stuff and the many copy cats to take off for another 10 years.
First of all its competitors are not MS Office and OpenOffice. Second, it's still beta! (just like nearly everything else Google is working on)
That said, it works. I've used it, though I don't use it. I'm done buying MS products, and I think Google Docs helps make that easier. There are a lot of people in the world who just need slightly better than a text editor and a way to publish it on the interweb. Google Docs provides that and it's free which is awesome, and simple which is also awesome.
See it for what it is, not what you expect it to be.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Socket 7
You're right - sorry, it was late at night & thanks for the correction. [I think I must have been getting "K6" & "K7" mixed up with "Socket 7" & the "Socket 6" which my imagination appears to have invented.]
the wonderful multiplier 2x = 6x
Yes, dollar for dollar, possibly the single greatest innovation in the entire history of the Personal Computer.
Because of that multiplier, I haven't had to upgrade any of the word-processing desktops or SOHO firewall/routers around here FOR 10 YEARS!!!
[And if the cable company can't offer us any more than 10mbps downstream, then I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade those SOHO firewall/routers FOR ANOTHER 10 YEARS!!!]
Talk about return on investment & the time value of money...
God, it's almost enough to make me nostalgic for an era when Chinese labor hadn't yet driven down hardware prices to the point that computers had become disposable items.
We certainly do seem to have lost the art of the in-place upgrade.
Boy, I'm starting to feel old.
K6-2 500mhz @ 6x 83mhz 460mhz
And the beauty of underclocking is two-fold:
1) Less power consumption = lower power bill.
2) Less heat = less chance of that 24 X 7 SOHO firewall/router catching on fire and burning the building down. [Knock on wood...]
Nothing like having that 24 X 7 SOHO firewall/router churning away at not a whole lot more than 98.6F.
Consider socket 775. The first processors for that came out in december 2004, clocked at around 2.6ghz. Replace that with a 3ghz quad core.
IF you've got a quality motherboard from a quality manufacturer [like Tyan - maybe Intel or ASUS] & they bother to issue whatever BIOS upgrades might be necessary to support it.
Remember, by issuing those BIOS upgrades, they lose money not once, but twice:
1) First they have to put big $$$'s into paying the salaries of the guys who write & test [both development test & regression test] the BIOS upgrade.
2) Then they lose the even bigger $$$'s which you would have spent to upgrade to a more modern board.
So they really have to be pretty decent fellows to treat their customers so conscientiously - it's certainly not something that the suits [with their MBA's] are gonna be crazy about.
For $15/mth you can get hosted sharepoint. Fully managed, you just point your app at it, login, and you get all the bells and whistles MS Office has.
The idea you need "full-time IT" for most Microsoft products is a fallacy.
Website Hosting
The original claim is a logical fallicy - the argument samples on the dependent variable.
Christensen examines something like 130 companies of which maybe 8 are considered successful. Only about 3 are left in the end. Many industries sort out like this.
So depending on how you look at it you can pretty much mock anyone with a 94-98% chance that they will not be disruptive.
You're making a pretty big leap by assuming Google Apps is in fact a disruptive innovation. It isn't. Smart companies will not give up that kind of control to Google. If the Internet goes down, you can't work. If Google ever goes under, Enron or Worldcom style, you're permanently screwed. If Google decides to make a change to an application that you don't want, you're screwed. The list goes on and on. Google apps is a novelty that might work for some small businesses without an IT department.
I think the migration needs to happen in an office place first before it starts to happen at home.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
First of all, I went back and looked at his comment, and I didn't see anything about a "laptop".
Having said that, though, I have no experience with putting K6-2's or K6-3's in Pentium Laptops.
If there isn't any underlying BIOS/system obstacle which can't be surmounted [to include whether the laptop can actually be "unscrewed" to get at its motherboard (& CPU), or whether the whole thing is permanently glued/welded shut], then the only other really obvious problem would be whether a housing which was designed to dissipate the heat from a 200MHz Intel Pentium could also withstand the higher heat of a 500MHz AMD K6-2 or K6-3.
In that regards, UNDER-clocking can be a real life-saver: If the 500MHz [or 550MHz or 600MHz] part runs too hot at 500MHz, then underclocking it, down to 450MHz, or 400MHz, might get you cool enough that the plastic wouldn't melt.
With the obvious added benefit that it might do wonders for the battery life.
With Google Applications I feel that it makes for a good 'home user' application when managing personal items, lists, or any sort of power application you may want to tool around with, all in all Google APPS is a great(powerful) resource, but imo not for large scale office use...
Open Office is a great route for open-source applications for offices, and Lotus Symphony; man, I have been using that for some time, but I don't know...It seems to demand a decent amount of CPU and Memory resources.
As for Google Apps/Office, if they do go any further with it, I have this hunch they will be selling it, not publishing it as an open source item.
Oh, and BTW, when was the last time you bought an RCA product? What about a Sony product? Yet when Sony was young, it was mocked as "cheap Japanese crap." Think of that next time someone mocks Google Apps.
1) Sony is "cheap Japanese crap." Ignoring all the political reasons not to buy Sony (the rootkits, the crazy DRM schemes), I've never seen a Sony DVD player last longer than 2 months. And that's three players owned by three different users. (Given, two were the same model.) Maybe Sony's high-end equipment is great, but I've never owned anything of theirs that was worth what I paid.
2) Google Apps kind of suck. I know, I know, it's Google, I shouldn't be saying this... but they do. No comparison for Office, not even remotely close. At this stage they'd have trouble going against OpenOffice.
Comment of the year
...it sure is nice to have Google Apps to pen ODF files in case I get stuck on a Windows machine where I can't install OOo for whatever reason (friend's work computer, etc). But yeah, I mostly use OOo.
Most corporations have strict policies about not allowing proprietary information travel along any external transmission lines. A company like Prudential would certainly use an office suite for documents containing customer info, so they would never be able to switch completely to google apps. I'm pretty sure that transferring such customer data to google would even be against the law.
I don't even use google docs for personal use, unless I plan to make the file public. I can't imagine someone considering using it for corporate use.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
This New York Times writer came to the opposite conclusion about Google Apps (free reg, yada yada).
How many people are we talking about here? If using Groove is too much hassle, you've got problems. Groove is easy to implement and can scale. Google apps can't. Why? Fucking bandwidth people. Are you going to drop a DS3 for your small office? No, you've got a T1 which you're probably already saturating just with email.
A home user on broadband has a lot of dedicated bandwidth for himself, so he can use online apps at a fairly good clip. Small offices have to SHARE a T1 or DSL line which will be absolutely slammed by Google apps. I'm not just singling out Google apps here, this is a major problem for most "software as a service" like Salesforce.com.
There is also the massive security risk of the offsite, all-eggs-in-one-basket, approach. Take Salesforce.com. They are a massive database of customer information that is CONSTANTLY being hammered by attackers since it is such a juicy target. Even if you had absolutely no security on your network you might be better off than using Salesforce because you're a much smaller target.
The beta argument is bullshit. It's pure deception for Google to call an application half-baked that it is, at the same time, pawning as a SaaS solution for large enterprises:
http://www.capgemini.com/google
You're a fool if you do not believe that Google is trying to position this as a replacement for more capable office suites. There are so many things about Google's approach here that infuriate me (beyond the obvious lack of functionality). As a security consultant, I will _never_ recommend that an organization use this product. Google is a marketing company. The bulk of their revenue is generated by drawing connections between information gleaned from and/or created by it's customers and marketing materials. It is a flat-out conflict of interest to expect Google to be a responsible steward of corporate information stored on it's systems; all of it's infrastructure is designed to mine this information, not to protect it.
Google Apps will never replace MS Office or Open Office. However it will complement. Google Apps is great for students doing assignments with its collaboration and can be used anywhere. You can start assignment at home and finish it at school/university. Maybe they should provide Google Apps on an Intranet server.
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My company uses Google Apps, we pay the fee for a higher quota (although they upped everyone's so that was not necessary anymore). We use GMail, but for Google Apps, not as much. But we do use it. For most other people, they use it because I send them documents via Google Apps. For me, I use it because I don't want to open Microsoft Word. I work with legal documents, regularly everyday documents, my own notes, etc. It's great. If it formatted better and is more compatible with word, I'd transfer all my documents there.
I use it for two reasons: I hate ever having to open Microsoft Word for most of these purposes because it's too heavy weight. If I want to sit down and write the final draft of a paper or thesis or book, I will sit down with LaTeX or Word and format the text. If I just want to edit something simple that does not require much formatting, which is like 99% of the case, I want to use VI on UNIX, and Google Apps is the equivalent of that for me. Simple, quick solution for 99% of my use. Plus, the sharing stuff is awesome.
I never really understood why most users near me feel the urge to open up Microsoft Word, rather heavy-weight, to do their 5 line of notes or to copy and paste things from a browser, etc. To me, something quicker, simpler, less memory intensive would be fine. I used Mac's TextEdit a lot because it was quick and easy, and you don't have to fight the auto-spell-correction or auto-listing or auto-formating features from Word when you don't need them. Now, I use Google Apps.
I will never get rid of MS Office, because it's heavy set of features are useful when I need them. But there's a place for Google Apps.