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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.'"
Windows inertia keeping people from using a proper operating system.
No sig today...
Google is trying to explode onto the scene with products and services that compete head to head with some very deeply ingrained technologies. Sometimes, like with the ChromeOS, it's like they are trying to compete against themselves.
What they will find is that earning a good reputation through customer satisfaction is the way to win over customers. Trying to bowl them over with competing products is almost never effective.
Google Search didn't kill Yahoo! search in one fell swoop.
Gmail didn't become dominant (and it still isn't) against Hotmail/Live Mail right away.
Google Maps was able to leverage the Google Search engine, but still has stiff competition from Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest.
But lately, they've been producing new products at an astonishing rate. Taking the shotgun approach of seeing which spaghetti sticks to the wall, Google doesn't seem to have a larger view of what they want to do with their technical talent. This is going to be their downfall in the long run as the advertisement-based profit stream slowly dries up.
Nope. Notes users are like abused women. They really believe that this time, everything will be okay, if they can only FORGIVE....
it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides
Isn't that the same as saying that companies like the functionality and are willing to pay for it?
I could certainly understand the point if it had said that they are not willing to lose the current interface or not willing to lose the training time already put in, but saying they are not willing to lose the functionality is the same as saying it is good software, they are willing to pay for it, and they are not willing to switch until someone can come up with something actually better.
The most exasperating irony of this situation (and its siblings of getting people to switch off of MS Office and Windows) is that each new version of Windows (and, recently Office) is a drastically new product anyway. Businesses say they don't want to retrain employees (and schools say that they have to train for MS products)--and then when XP or Vista or Win7 rolls around, they retrain anyway but still claim that familiarity with the interface is the reason they won't consider alternatives.
I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email. There is so much critical information about a company in their email, why would they trust it to any external company, even if it is Google. Also, I'm unfamiliar with how Google handles data retention of email. Outlook allows some backup of emails at the IT level of all company emails (included deleted ones).
I know I wouldn't want to have my company give up control of it's email to Google (5000 person company).
Its not what it is, its something else.
Oh come on now. He isn't all that bad. Sure, he has his issues. He is slow. He is bloated. He doesn't treat me correctly. He's complex. He's slow. The way he treats me leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, I would rather he talked to me instead of punch me in the face. He is slow. He has a hard time staying employed. But really, he's not THAT bad...
Google appear to be actually focusing on emails replacement and to me it looks very promising: Wave combines email, instant messaging and collaboration. You can run it on googles servers or on your own. Its very promising. Google Wave http://wave.google.com/ Common irritations with email, - replying to one person, reply to the group, making sure everyones included - trying to coordinate on one document via email and contant back forth emails
If the next version of Outlook is as different as the last issue of Word was from everything that went before, the advantage of familiarity will disappear.
I think it's a little different with Outlook - the tasks are much simpler (read and respond to email, manage a calender) for most users - many of who probably on use one or two task bar items (New, Reply, print) or tabs (Day, week, Month) so the switch wont entail learning a lot of new menus. So even if you change the overall interface as long as the on-screen view is relatively familiar people won't care.
Word, otoh, is much more of a user intensive experience; requiring the use of more commands, even if some are used infrequently. As a result, interface changes have a much greater impact.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You've certainly nailed one of the biggest issues. The ability to control your data, have a deletion policy that is then subpoena-free (including backup destruction), etc. is certainly a deal breaker for most larger companies.
There are other issues too though:
Availability / uptime (and yes, I know a poorly run Exchange infrastructure can have a lot of downtime, but a well run one - ours - has certainly outperformed the availability of Google over the last two years)
Integration with other MS applications such as SharePoint and Access
Another aspect of the "data control" is user control - some companies don't want their folks logging on to mail from just any old virus-infected, malware laden machine and want them to only connect via known good machines on the corporate network. Gmail makes that control impossible.
There are many others, but that's the flavor. I know that some small companies and even some medium ones will think the above concerns are silly and misplaced, but that's the type of argument you are going to get from the big hitters.
There are a lot more issues than just getting used to a new set of tools.
I recently set up a new small startup company. We have 4 staff, but 3 of us work a lot from home, coming into the office only once or twice a week. As an experiment I set us all up on Google Apps Premium. The email is great - no complaints. Gmail has always been my webmail of choice, and with POP/IMAP support my 2 Mac guys can use mail.app to their hearts content.
Calendar is so-so. Sharing calendars, particularly more than one seems a bit erratic, but it's just about good enough for us to use (we really need shared calendars do the the business we operate).
Docs is the main weakness. The office suite just doesn't have the feature set of any of the offline suites. Offline support is lacking. It frustrates me that Google make a huge thing of this being a set of "collaboration" tools and yet leave out (or don't implement) a really simple and obvious feature like folder-level sharing. If you want to share a folder containing sub-folders with other people in your group, you have to meticulously go through the directory structure and share all the bloody files in each sub-folder individually. Why the hell can't I just share the top folder and have it apply sharing to the rest of the tree?
What worries me more, is that when you go into the requested features forum, you can see that people have been asking for this for a long time now and it's not happened. Which makes me think that Google simply aren't putting a lot of resource into developing it. I don't like entrusting the future of my business into something that they might just drop like a stone if they feel like it. And without more feedback from the devs, and noticeable improvements over time, it certainly feels like they could.
The docs file manager tool itself seems completely brain-damaged at times. You can drag a file from one folder to another, and it disappears. The folder displays (2 items) but only 1 is visible. Where the fuck did it go, and why should I have to kill my browser window and re-launch to see it? I could go on, but I think a couple of examples are enough to suggest that there are what I would suggest are basic areas of functionality that simply aren't ready for prime-time yet.
Eventually we gave up and went back to an offline office suite. Google Apps is a nice idea, and I'm sure that when it's anywhere near fully functional it'll be a very handy for us. But right now it's not even close.
I apologize for the rather disorganized rant. If I'd had more time I'd have written a more organized critique, but given that I was on my way to bed, I banged out this comment in a quick 5 minute brain splurge.
I'm the lead developer for a product that is currently available only for Outlook (shameless plug/advertisement: http://www.lettermark.com/ )
The next major release which of the system, which now supports Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Apple Mail, and of course Outlook is in the early alpha stages and has been given to several of our larger clients. We've worked with these clients through their Outlook upgrades, complaints and joys.
I can tell you that none of them will ever switch to Gmail as it stands. Theres a good chance none of them will switch off Outlook any time soon, period.
Its not JUST about the company data sitting somewhere else, that really doesn't bother a lot of companies as shocking as it sounds.
The problem? Any of the customers we have, and pretty much ALL of the customers we have that are over 100 seats ALL have other products besides ours that integrate with Outlook to make their email part of a larger workflow. These people track sales, customer relations, trouble tickets, orders, you name it, ALL via Outlook and most of the time using Exchange so that the data can nicely be shared, calendars can be viewed, ect.
Some of this you can do with GMail, but its a pain in the ass. We also have use Google Apps for your Domain to test with. Its not even close, and can't be until they open it up. Yes, Outlook is far more open than GMail in its wettest dreams.
GMail doesn't let my random sales person app hit a button then thrown an entire wedding planning itinerary into an email to the customer, which is also stored in the sales system.
GMail doesn't let my random technical support person import the message into our issue tracking system.
GMail doesn't let me encrypt messages with personally identifiable information in it, which is required by law, regardless of whom it is sent to in a couple of states now.
In short, you may call it 'inertia' if by 'inertia' you mean a far more mature and feature rich product. Otherwise it is simply, and I cringe as I type this, that Outlook is a far more useful tool than GMail.
I HAVE to deal with Outlook and Exchange, I know far too much about it. I ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT STAND IT. The only reason we're supporting other email clients going forward is because I refuse to be forced to use Outlook for email, so I want a choice. Fortunately, there are still large organizations that use things like Groupwise and Lotus Notes which allowed me a very nice business case for supporting more than just Outlook when I took the project over.
But if you think for a second there is a replacement for the Outlook/Exchange combination for a integrated solution of your typical business persons email/contacts/calendar then you're are completely out of touch with reality. I REALLY REALLY wish there was, but there isn't. And GMail isn't anything more than OWA, with less features and a better UI. Its just missing far too many features and the ability for third party software to integrate with it for it to become a replacement for Outlook. Not to mention the legal issues as to why companies really shouldn't be using GMail when customer data is being emailed.
I wish that someone out there would realize this and actually make real Thunderbird extensions to make it on par with the Outlook, but it doesn't exist. I've used all the OSS alternatives, if you think they are equal, you haven't used one of the two things you are comparing. It wouldn't even freaking be hard, all you need is some damn plugins that use IMAP folders for storing things. Do it on something like Cyrus IMAP which has proper notify support and it really could be just as good if not better than exchange! I'd do it myself if I wasn't so overloaded aleady.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So what is a "proper" OS? What does Windows do wrong, that your "proper" OS does right? Provides a standard, enriched experience where more than just a kernel is standardized? Makes the OS easy to use without a command line? Has a working audio layer? Oh wait... those are all good things.
What is it that Windows doesn't do, that keeps it from being "proper"? I'd really like to know since it seems that, well, Windows does pretty much everything. You want to do office productivity stuff? Yep, Windows is good at that. Need a web server? Sure it'll do that. Wanna play games? That's fine too. Doing some media production? No problem.
I get a little tired of this attitude that Windows is such a bad OS and if only people would "see the light" things would be better. Oh really? Then why is it that I can do everything I want with Windows with very little difficulty, which is quite a varied set of things, but when I try to do it on Linux I discover some easy, some very hard, some impossible? From a user standpoint, Windows works well.
The argument of it not being a "proper" OS to me sounds like generally snobbery, the same sort you get from people who think that only their very limited taste in movies are "proper" movies or only their very limited taste in beer is "proper" beer. No, not really. If Linux works well for you that is wonderful, by all means use it, but don't try and push it as the One True Way(tm) unless you've got something more than condescension to back it up with.
To most people, a computer is a tool. They aren't in it for a philosophical or semantic debate, they want it to do whatever various functions they need, and do it with a minimum of fuss on their part.
Google isn't evil so this doesn't matter. They said so themsleves.