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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.'"
I would give up my children to be free of that combo. Not one of those tools works well either by itself or together. Sharepoint in particular has no value what so ever and Outlook and Office are steaming piles of shit.
Can't wait for Google Wave to be available hopefully it will crush Outhouse/Exchange.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
The article is smoking crack on one point: It's not the *users* who are inertial. It's the Minesweeper Champion Solitaire Experts (MCSE) who run their IT operations, who are deeply invested in all the crap they had to learn to keep Domain Controllers and Exchange Servers running.
-=Maggie Leber=-
I've never used Google Apps, but I've used Gmail and it doesn't hold a candle to Outlook in terms of features. The ability to search all mail quickly is a great feature, but that's just one feature compared to dozens if not hundreds of features that Outlook has that Gmail lacks.
There is no free mail client that comes anywhere close to the configurability of Outlook. I use Outlook at work and Thunderbird at home and I'm constantly frustrated by the unconfigurable straitjacket of Thunderbird. I suppose the classic open source answer is that if Thunderbird doesn't do what I want I should shut up and code the features myself or write a mail client from scratch. The non-zealot answer is just to use Outlook because it works well and is extremely configurable.
You say that as if Windows were an operating system. That is like saying that a Bobby Car is fit and eligible for the 24 hours of Le Mans race. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Usually, you'd have some type of agreement with the bank that, if your money goes missing (hackers, bank robbery, whatever), you're covered.
I'm pretty sure Google's policy is, "Oops. Well, you have backups, right?"
Office has significantly changed once in its entire history. Once. Windows, on the other hand, has actually changed ZERO times, unless you count trivial cosmetic changes, in which its changed twice in its entire history. Twice.
In short, you're full of shit.
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For some values of {changed|significantly|Office|Windows|shit}. Have you tried using pre-Windows versions of Word? Windows 1.0/3.1/95? There were significant changes
You're going back lifetimes. And being an pedantic asshole.
for example, Unicode support is a significant development as is, oh, I dunno, multitasking.
And yet neither of those changes require re-training.
Just admit you were full of shit so we can move on.
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Those changes aren't "significant" those changes are "trivial." You guys are really, really stretching to prove the grandparent's retarded point.
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The problem with google is the terms of service, google does not offer you full ownership of your data, they wont negotiate out out clauses they dont make guranties and whont offer fixed compensation when guranties are breached, it's the same deal with apple and a big reason apple is non existiant in the business to business market.
Take a standard linux netbook use non google webtools and you can get those deals but google acts the same way apple does and ignores the business market, this is wry this debate is pointless google isnt even trying to enter this market, they are plotting to take the low end consumer market not the enterprise market.
The reason this is being debated is that the fortune 5000 companies are trying to ditch their PC's and go back to the mainframes as fast as they can and google is the most visible of the new timeshare systems, because they are consumer oriented and not enterprise oriented.
Theres other players like zimbra, zoho or thinkfree that specificly targets enterprise and some of the old forgotten giants still lingers around in the shadows.
If a hardware driver is not part of the OS then what the f* is?.
A hardware driver Microsoft does not provide, is not their responsibility. Windows can - and does for millions - run fine without BSODs or other forms of instability. That means stability problems are not inherent to the OS.
Your comment about X shows that you are really thinking of it in terms of a full desktop VNC instead of a way to run single applications from multiple hosts - and you can get X for MS Windows anyway although it only works in one direction (hopefully now that MS is attempting to move into clusters they will do something about that).
Doubtful, and terminal services already supports individual application sessions anyway. The main problem with the X model is the inability to disconnect from sessions and leave applications running (without additional hackery).
The mixup about DLL hell is amusing and puts all your other replies into context.
What mixup ? Windows left DLL hell behind years ago. Dependency hell is very much a part of contemporary Linux, especially if you need something that your package manager can't provide.
I also suspect that your view of the registry also stems from little experience with that obfiscated hiding place for malware which was really only possible to backup when volume shadow copy came around - when the one file that NEEDS to be backed up can't be backed up within the operating system that is a bit of a sign that things are broken.
Pretty sure you could backup the Registyr prior to Windows 2003.
The number of times people have come to me saying the backups have everything apart from the registry and the users email and could I please help recover the disk is somewhat ridiculous [...]
So they weren't competent enough to backup user emails, and your first instinct is to blame the OS ?
[...] until recently it was a hobby OS suitable for launching games that somehow got into the workplace.
Right. And by "recently" you mean back when it started dominating the business world in the '90s.