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Outlook Inertia the Main Factor Holding Business From Google Apps
Meshach writes "There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar. Basically, Google is underestimating how attached businesses and their workers are to Office and Outlook in particular. Quoting: 'Google has found out that, yes, many companies are happy to ditch Exchange for Gmail if it means saving money and eliminating the grief of maintaining Exchange in-house. However, and maybe to a degree unexpected by Google, it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides, thanks to the deep links that exist between this client-server tandem.'"
No, its the users.
Only idiots want to run Exchange, and they want to run exchange when the company is tiny, when running Exchange is easy and relatively hassle free.
Exchange is actually not so bad in a tiny company, it sucks ass when you are a large company.
However, users want integrated calendars, scheduling/free/busy notification, global contacts, personal contacts, shared contacts, global shared folders, user controllable shared folders, they want it on all their PCs and they want it available from the web when they've got a dead battery and only a Internet Cafe to check in from. They want it to keep their blackberry in sync and they want it to coordinate the 150 other things that Outlook/Exchange do well on a small scale that allow Outlook users to, I know this is hard to believe, be productive.
Users love Outlook/Exchange. The admins hate it with a passion, but thanks for showing us how little grasp you have on the IT world.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I hate to say this in defense of MS but...
Having a superior product isn't 'Lock-In'.
Lock-in is when you have a bunch of data and prevent people from taking it to some thing different.
You can't call it lock-in when you basically say 'I like product A better than product B because product A has (insert feature list) and product B doesn't, or product B is a loosely connected amalgamation of simple tools trying to pretend to be A.
The only thing GMail has over Outlook/Exchange is reliability. So far, GMail appears more reliable than an Exchange server generally is, however thats probably because GMail just has far more servers to throw at it. Long term, GMail isn't even really cheaper than Outlook/Exchange unless you're doing the freebe apps for your domain or standard gmail, in which case you've just basically given up every single feature of Outlook/Exchange in order to go back to email the way it was in 1996, with a pretty web interface.
If Google wants to compete, they have to produce a superior product. GMail and Apps for your Domain in their current forms aren't superior products.
There is no lock-in because there is no competing product with a comparable feature set, and its pretty easy to export your data from all the products you mentioned so that it can be moved.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Windows doesn't even come with a decent shell, so it's already decades behind unix-like systems on file management.