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.'"

Comments

Not the *users* who are inertial

[MaggieL]

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.

Outlook has ton of features

[Paul Carver]

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.