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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.
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.
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
> if your internet crashes, you can't do anything
Are there ANY companies left for which that isn't already the case? OK, actual manufacturing maybe. They can go off and manufacture stuff, or whatever.
But anyone with a desk job requires the Internet. Your customers use email; your coworkers use email; everyone uses Google search. Our company grinds to a halt and starts pounding on the IT lady's door every time the Internet goes down in the office. (Not often, fortunately.)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I find the Collaboration, and historic persistence of spreadsheets very attractive.
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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
Personally: Intranet, yes. Internet, no.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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).
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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.
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?
And if you use a email client like Lotus Notes (which has replication) or Microsoft Outlook (which has offline folder storage), you can still access your calendar, email, address book, etc. without the network. You can write emails and have them sent when you're connected again; you can delete/move things and have the changes synchronized when you're reconnected.
If you're using gmail, good luck.
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.
i never actually seen a Socket 6 motherboard
I owned Socket 7 mainboards
I had a K6-2 with the wonderful multiplier 2x = 6x that AMD was kind enough to offer.
I upgraded from Pentium nonMMX 100mhz to K6-2 500mhz @ 6x 83mhz 460mhz
on a terrible board with max multiplier 3.5 or Pentium 233.
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.
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.