Google Challenging Microsoft For Business Software

SternisheFan tips a report at the NY Times about the progress Google is making in its quest to unseat Microsoft's position atop the business software industry. From the article: It has taken years, but Google seems to be cutting into Microsoft's stronghold — businesses. ... In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it. One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe. ... Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat. Google 'has not yet shown they are truly serious,' said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division. 'From the outside, they are an advertising company.'"

Comments

Re:Awful Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Which package?

Google Apps. It's in the second sentence of the article.

Really? This is a Google invention?

How do you get a claim of invention? they've simply added it to their product.

Context is everything. Simply snipping an article excerpt, without correct context, is poor editorial work.

Granted the submitter could have substituted for 'it", but he does say "from the article," which should have given you some indication of where to look. You could have answered your own questions faster than you wrote your complaint. And you even had to resort to a straw man to stretch it all the way out to a whopping two items.

They are an advertising company, like who else?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Google 'has not yet shown they are truly serious,' said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division. 'From the outside, they are an advertising company.'

From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh506371(v=msads.10).aspx

Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8

The Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 allows developers to show ads in their apps. You can use your Windows 8 apps to make money by including ads from Microsoft Advertising. The Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 along with Microsoft pubCenter enables you to create apps that:

• Easily integrate text and banner ads into your apps and games.
• Provide a money making solution that maximizes in-app advertising.
• Provide ad targeting capabilities to deliver the most relevant ads to your users.
• Seamlessly handle impression reporting.
• Monitor your ad performance in real time.

Re:They are an advertising company, like who else?

[RazorSharp]

You should check out how much money Microsoft has spent over the last ten years trying to become an advertising company. They know that between FOSS alternatives and Google that MS Office is doomed and they're looking for a new cash cow. They tried TV (many times in many ways) and failed. They tried video games and, while they managed to break into the market, it's certainly no cash cow like Office is. That's why their current focus is on Bing and cloud services and other services that Google already does better and more successfully -- basically, the statistic you provided just demonstrates how massively MS is failing in their current endeavors. They're still just milking the same old cows that are ready for the slaughterhouse while their grain fields are failing to grow.

Re:No bells and whistles

[cheesybagel]

Most of the new clients Microsoft has had recently came to it because of SharePoint. Google Apps collaboration features basically kill SharePoint. Yes it also kills Outlook and Exchange.

Re:SharePoint

[lwriemen]

I've never understood the point of SharePoint. Maybe I've never seen it implemented properly, but I don't see how a company could come up with a valid cost/benefit justification for it. OTOH, marketing promises and the lure of moving all IT to low-cost sites probably makes it very attractive to corporate heads; (often unmeasured) worker productivity be damned.

The real threat is not Google ...

[Taco Cowboy]

... but rather, walled garden and locked devices

Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies

[jbolden]

That's not Outlook, that's an Exchange setting. If you were using Outlook as your gmail client you wouldn't get that either.

Re:So...do the math.

[CrankyFool]

If you're comparing the cost of GAFYD (Google Apps For Your Domain) to the cost of running Word, Excel, and Powerpoint on your desktop, then either you're doing it wrong, or you wouldn't be well served to switch.

Where GAFYD kicks Microsoft's ass is in online collaboration (because it's better) and unified messaging (because it's less expensive). So it's not about Word -- it's about Google Talk being better than Microsoft Lync, and about Google Mail and Google Drive being being more cost-effective than Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint.

Because it turns out it costs a little more than $50/person to run a really great-running Exchange environment. That's not an oxymoron, BTW - I currently work at a company that has a fantastic Exchange environment, best I've ever seen run. And I'm really going to miss it in the upcoming quarter when IT shoves our migration to GAFYD down my throat. And I'm not even a Windows user ...

Re: one of the biggest and most powerful companies

[Rob Y.]

It wasn't just the competitive upgrades. They also struck deals with OEM's so that, for a while at least, it was hard to find a Windows PC that didn't come with MSOffice 'for free'. That was the point where the company I worked for switched from WordPerfect to Word. And people complained for the next 6 months about the lack of WordPerfect's show codes feature. Of course, they eventually got used to Word, but victory didn't come because of quality or desire - it was monopoly bundling deals pure and simple.