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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.
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.
> 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
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!
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.
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.
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.
But, the upside is, everybody can work at it from any location, no more reason to give (expensive) laptops with sensitive data that can be 'lost' or 'stolen' when they can use their own home computer/laptop and use https to work on documents.
Yes, the internet-thingy going down is a downside but I noticed that wherever I work, if the Internet goes down, the company grinds to a halt, even for people that aren't really involved on the internet for business (why does the cleaning crew or even hr need internet access anyway?)
And hardly anybody in a company uses all the functionality that MS Office, OpenOffice or iWork has to offer. For those people, you can stick to buying them the Office suite but for a lot (maybe 90%) just typing in a document or setting up a spreadsheet is as far as their business-related computer work goes.
And as for the 'cheap' part: $50/user/year for a full (or somewhat full) functional office package that is accessible anywhere with collaboration and central storage is fairly cheap. Just the licensing costs for Office are higher even for educational and then you haven't even started setting up ShitPoint, Dead Office Collaborator or a simple file storage for each department.
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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.
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
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.)
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.