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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.'"
Google Apps. It's in the second sentence of the article.
How do you get a claim of invention? they've simply added it to their product.
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.
Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat.
Isn't this what happened to Microsoft in the mobile/phone/tablet space? Now they are playing catch-up to both Google and Apple. Complacency is a dangerous copilot.
From Language: Microsoft Business Division Marketspeak
"Google has not yet shown they are truly serious. From the outside, they are an advertising company."
To Language: Reality
"We have shit in our pants about this and aren't able to figure out how to avoid destruction, so we'll try to dismiss the threat. We always say the same about real threats. And worst, our bad dreams always turn up true (see previous dismissals about Linux, Apple, Facebook and Google before)"
'Added the ability' is not meant to be read 'invented' - please bring a meaninful criticism to the discussion if you have one.
Now gmail and to some extent also video chat in Google are pretty impressive. But the rest of the Google Apps are pretty pathetic feature-wise compared to MS Office. Except for collaboration features that just work out of the box.
But the problem for Microsoft is that with more and more business communication never going through paper, many of these features are actually not terribly important compared to effortless collaboration, in fact their existence just make the products more complicated.
An exception here might be Excel and the support for extending Word/Excel/Outlook - some people integrate their workflow toolchain into Office rather than the other way around. But still, a sizable chunk of Microsoft's market could probably switch and be happier.
I guess that's why Microsoft is jumping on the cloud bandwagon too. Which strikes me as a smart idea, I do think that most organizations would probably prefer to continue to pay Microsoft, even if it's a bit more expensive.
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:
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Yeah. It's like they added this feature to their product. Rather than Microsoft who claims they 'innovate' everything they do.
Actually ironically Google is simply doing what MSFT did in the past, which was taking a market from morons. How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed. Same thing happened with IE and Netscape, Netscape put out the disaster that was NS 4 and gave MSFT a market by default, same again with Windows VS BeOS, which chose first a lame AT&T CPU that bombed, then the Motorola chip that was already fading before finally getting the sense too late to make an X86 version.
Now MSFT is being run by an absolute moron named Steve "What is Apple doing?" Ballmer who is about to make a move that will make the Osbourne effect or HP buying Palm look like minor boo boos. For those that don't know what I'm talking about look up "Windows Blue" where Ballmer laid out his "game plan" for MSFT past Win 8. in it he says Windows will get YEARLY releases (just like Apple) Microsoft will take over the production of hardware (just like Apple) stop selling to the low end (see a pattern here?) and tie every single thing to an appstore (Can Apple sue for plagiarism?) while making their own phones (ditto) laptops (uh huh) and desktops (Ray Charles could see through this plan) at high markups like they are doing with the surface, which they had to slash orders for in half because nobody is gonna pay $800 for a Windows device that won't run Windows programs.
So if the board doesn't stop smoking weed and wake the fuck up but quick I predict in 5 years we are gonna see the low end and a HELL of a lot of the businesses move to Google, after all Android has tons of apps and Google has already said they are gonna combine ChromeOS and Android so it really wouldn't be hard for Google to simply bake in something like Crossover to support some legacy Windows programs, Apple will keep the high end, although frankly i think their stock is gonna take a serious tumble when everyone sees that Cook can't pull new markets out of his ass like Jobs did, and MSFT will be relegated to legacy installs and a bunch of MSFT stores that will look like ghost towns.
In the end it won't be because Google made this truly amazing thing, although I give them credit in that they are putting in the work, nope its because Steve Ballmer drank too much eggnog and got it in his head you can take a Pinto, slap a coat of paint on it along with a $100,000 price tag, and it will magically compete with a Porsche. MSFT is a Walmart brand but because Ballmer cares more about what Wall Street thinks than in making good products he is just gonna copy every damned thing Apple is doing and think that people will buy windows...why? Because they like the WinFlag? He butchered the UI, his appstore is a joke, and just ask Intel about how well those crazy high Ultrabooks sold, they got warehouses full of the things.
At the end of the day Windows 8 just doesn't work, the new office will probably end up all metro and ribbon and it won't work, so frankly all Google has to do is make something that works and that lets you do things easily and they can take the Walmart shoppers and the small businesses simply by virtue of MSFT thinking they can take Apple's customers, how retarded. want a perfect example of Ballmer thinking? He said when he canceled Windows Home Server "Oh we have all those features in windows SBS now so we aren't leaving the market as people will just switch to SBS". Hmmm...Windows Home Server..$40, Windows SBS? $400!!! But that is Ballmer in a nutshell, he thinks he can take a brand that has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years and just jack the living fuck out of the price and people will go "Ohh Windows is a hip brand now so we'll pay!" yeah the reason that Google is gaining is because Ballmer and his marketing drones go over about as well as a shit brown Zune.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Here's a quick paste from the article:
Google Apps Challenging Microsoft in Business By QUENTIN HARDY Published: December 25, 2012 Facebook Twitter Google+ Save E-mail Share Print Reprints SAN FRANCISCO — It has taken years, but Google seems to be cutting into Microsoft’s stronghold — businesses.
Virginie Drujon-Kippelen for The New York Times
Jim Nielsen, center, of Shaw Industries calculated that using Google instead of similar Microsoft products would cost, over seven years, about one-thirteenth Microsoft’s price.
Google’s software for businesses, Google Apps, consists of applications for document writing, collaboration, and text and video communications — all cloud-based, so that none of the software is on an office worker’s computer. Google has been promoting the idea for more than six years, and it seemed that it was going to appeal mostly to small businesses and tech start-ups.
But the notion is catching on with larger enterprises. 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.
Many companies that sell software over the cloud add features without raising prices, but also break from traditional industry practice by rarely offering discounts from the list price.
Microsoft’s Office suite of software, which does not include e-mail, is installed on a desktop PC or laptop. In 2013, the list price for businesses will be $400 per computer, but many companies pay half that after negotiating a volume deal.
At the same time, Microsoft has built its business on raising prices for extra features and services. The 2013 version of Office, for example, costs up to $50 more than its predecessor.
“Google is getting traction” on Microsoft, said Melissa Webster, an analyst with IDC. “Its ‘good enough’ product has become pretty good. It looks like 2013 is going to be the year for content and collaboration in the cloud.”
Which AT&T CPU was BeOS originally on? And when the BeBox was made, the PREP boxes from Motorola were already making their rounds - the PPC was nowhere near fading. Be's mistake was in jettisoning the BeBox before Motorola, Power Computing and Umax endorsed BeOS. When Apple pulled the plug on the clone business, Be could have offered them the choice of making BeOS the default OS for their PREP boxes - in that case, Power Computing would have survived, and PPC, despite this setback and despite OS/2-PPC coming unhinged, would have had a better chance at being successful.
x86 was never a good platform for Be - anybody who had an x86 ran Windows on it, or at a distant second, Linux or OS/2. There was hardly room for a third, fourth or fifth OS. Putting BeOS on one of the alternatives, like PPC was a good move, as was coming out w/ a whole new computer such as the BeBox. Just that as a new OS, there was little native software for that platform (would have been the case on either PPC or x86) and the BeBox itself was more of a home/hobbyist computer, much like the Amigas or Ataris. Had Be kept that platform going and released essential software for it, from money managers, games, office suites, et al, instead of abandoning it just b'cos it could be adapted by clone makers, they may well have been more successful.
"We are not planning on doing anything until it is too late." said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division.
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.
... but rather, walled garden and locked devices
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There is absolutely nothing in the NYTimes story that points to any new development that justifies the headline. Google Apps has been chipping away at the incumbent MS Office for a few years now and, at best, could be building momentum. Like many "stories" released during the Christmas season, this most likely was one of those weak story ideas that had once been shelved and has come to the rescue of some lurking journalist.
It's not even accurate. I work for Roche in the UK, and currently, we use MS Office. There are apparently plans to transition us to Google Apps sometime in 2013, but that's as close as it gets. I believe that this is the case for other countries, and the global organisation too. (Incidentally, this transition was pushed by the Roche - Genentech merger: Genentech uses Google Apps, and to align the two organisations, one had to move. Google won... although Genentech colleagues lament the loss of Outlook to this day.)
In addition, while I can see that Gmail / Calendar and maybe document editing will be fine, I'd expect that a good swathe of the company will still need MS Excel - lots of us regularly use functionality that the Google spreadsheet doesn't possess.
What a great plan. I'm pretty sure Microsoft would love this, and there would be no lawyers involved.
Meh I've felt for the last year that MS and Windows are on the way out. Windows 8 was there attempt to get people used to Metro and attempt some relevance in the touch space. The desktop is dead and MS know that, the new market is in the touch devices and using task-based UIs over file-based ones. My house mate is anxiously awaiting his new Nokia phone, and believes MS can manage to capture 30% so we have a good conversation about their new actions most days.
With Android expecting to hit 90% market share next year I believe their only chance is to get on the augmented reality bandwagon and hope Apple don't have something in development yet. With rumours that the next Xbox will have an AR addon it's quite possible they are doing this.
I've never seen it implemented properly either. From my experience I've seen document versions disappear and the whole checkin/checkout thing seems to get confused. So people end up doing a save as and giving the new version a different name than the previous one...defeating the purpose of SharePoint. It seems to be quite slow as well. Again, maybe this was just the way it was being managed but I'm still looking for a correctly implemented version.
That's funny... I've never had gmail lock up... or tell me I had too much mail and I couldn't send until I deleted some... Outlook is a dinosaur and it's time for it to die.
Actually only seldom have 100% backwards compatible applications or OSes succeeded. UNIX was not the same as Multics. MS-DOS was not the same as CP/M. Microsoft Word was not the same as Wordperfect and Excel was not the same as Lotus. You will probably notice some patterns here. The new entrant was cheaper or the incumbent did not bother switching platforms as the market shifted. ChromeOS has failed so far but Android has not. Microsoft managed to alienate their OEMs with Surface enough that Chromebooks are actually starting to be pushed to the end client in a way I personally never believed would happen. So who knows.
That's not Outlook, that's an Exchange setting. If you were using Outlook as your gmail client you wouldn't get that either.
Don't forget the whole internet thing and how they ignored it.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed.
That is not at all what happened. First off Microsoft Word for DOS at the time of the Windows switch was already a rather good product and quite popular. While it was clearly in 2nd / 3rd place it wasn't coming out of nowhere.
WordPerfect was heavily focused on cross platform and many non DOS versions. They were working on a Windows versions and came out within about a year of Windows 3.0's release. DOS was still the dominant platform when WordPerfect for Windows came out. It wasn't all that much more buggy than any of the word Processors were. Word was a bit faster, and better integrated the all around best experience but AmiPro, WordPerfect... were better and frankly DeScribe was likely the most feature rich least buggy word processor of the time.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating. WordPerfect was hit with a common problem where it made economic sense for them lose marketshare rather than immediately cut prices by 90%. They eventually did offer a product mixed with Borland's Paradox and QuatroPro but by then it was too late.
I might want some of what you're smoking.
Microsoft made their money on Windows and Office. When they lose that base, they are on the way down. When the fall starts, it will accelerate rapidly.
On second thought, no, I don't want any of what you're smoking.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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 ...
has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years
IBM compatibles did not sell at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years. Commodore, Synclair, Atari owned that market slice during the 80s and the early 90s. Apple was lower end than Microsoft. Microsoft was positioned nicely in the middle range with the "junky" systems beneath them and the "too expensive" systems: DEC, SGI, Sun, IBM RISC/6000 ... above them.
The Walmart pricing is a product of the 2000s where corporations stopped upgrading rapidly and thus applications had to support older machines, and discount machines offered the capabilities of older machines. That's a nasty cycle that Microsoft partially created by allowing for a pause with Windows XP. They realize their mistake and they are fixing it.
And yeah, the bottom 1/3rd of the Windows market, which shouldn't have been part of the midrange in the first place might go for something cheaper.
Microsoft Live is not yet Google Docs, and Google Docs are a long way from Microsoft Office (though each is getting closer).
For a large volume of uses Google Docs is sufficient. If you need to create a simple memo or even a modest legal document Docs is certainly good enough. But it is not remotely getting closer to Office in the larger picture. Office is moving forward much, much faster in high-end business applications. Just take the example of Excel: the new data analysis and reporting capabilities built in to Excel are simply amazing. They exceed anything available from the best vertical reporting apps just a few years back, and are accessible to advanced business users for "playing around" with the data in ways that formerly would have required advanced data warehouse experts. These features in Excel are game changing in the corporate environment where Excel is a stock application for all business user desktops.
But still, there is a reason pretty much everybody I know use some kind of web based email, gmail probably being the most used. I don't think it's because they hate it. While I don't know how many uses Google docs, you have to be some kind of hardcore office nerd to really need something else.
Not sure why that is the case, can you elaborate? I do Outlook searches in Windows 7 from the command text box on the Start menu, inside Outlook using the box above the inbox on Windows 8 (that is an area Microsoft failed in; the search from the OS does not include data inside of Outlook); and inside of Outlook on the mac. In every case it is less than a second and I have 9,000 emails on average in the inbox, and 20,000+ across all folders including an archive.pst file. What do you see?
no comment
Yeah right
First off do not tell 90% of corps who standardize on IE 6, 7, and 8 to go hell! Google docs is absolutely useless. Not even IE 8 which is the defecto standard for every single Intranet app in existence. I could see dropping IE 6 (that itself will cost business). Corps must use IE only as it is the only one with group policy, active directory, mass deployment, and a slow release cycle. Before the IE haters mod me down, ask yourselves why aren't you writing extensions to Firefox and Chrome for these features?
Also GoogleDocs is a glorified wordpad in functionality but with sharing. It is great to share something simple for a group project for college students but it is not as functional as LibreOffice or MS Office.
Office 365 has more features, integrates with the MS ecosystem, and supports older versions of IE where upgrading is out of the question and would cost more than savings with free Google Docs.
Google needs to .msi, active directory, group policy, and deployment tools that are centrally managed to Chrome
1. Update Chrome every 1 - 2 years
2. Add
3. Support ancient versions of IE. Yes, we hate them and yes HTML 5 features like drag and drop is nice, but javascript and css3pie can emulate them. With $500,000 worth of ancient apps that browser is not going away! XP users are stuck at IE 8 not to mention IE 8 is targeted for WIndows 7 users as well as it is the universal browser that works with both operating systems.
http://saveie6.com/
The other thing about Google Apps is that it's designed for Chrome and if it works on anything else that's nice but they don't care and it's Not Supported. (You can also use Chromium.)
My company uses google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations on Firefox and IE. We told them our configuration, and we get support. I think you are full of shit.
Here's the other thing a lot of people miss when discussing this issue, as well:
Many (bigger) companies would rather have "one office suite to rule them all" than "two separate office suites - one for 'type a memo' guy, and one for 'i need deep and powerful data analysis tools built into my spreadsheet' guy." Especially when those two office suites may not be easily inter-operable.
There is additional support costs associated with having two different packages, and there is an additional "waste" cost associated with it as well - not everybody who requests an MS Office install is going to strictly need it; not everybody who has Google Apps only will be able to get everything he needs done easily.
So, purchasing decisions are made in the interests of simplicity and giving everybody a standard tool to work with, and I'd be surprised if Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements weren't reasonably competitive with this on a per-user basis, especially when you figure in the additional features and functionality available that Google Apps simply doesn't have.
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.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
For me, the issue is about compatibility. It's not a personal preference for Word. For example, I actually used LibreOffice to create the documents for a presentation and I saved each document in a different Word & Power Point format. Each file had around 3 copies. I then made PDF copies of each, just in case the files were not compatible. LibreOffice claims compatibility, but that doesn't mean that it will be and of course they were not compatible. The files simply would not open in Microsoft's products, regardless of the file format that I tried.
It can be debated that this is Microsoft's fault, but I honestly don't care. At the end of the day, what matters is that the presentation works and can be shown to the people that need to see at the time that I need to show it to them. Finger pointing isn't going to make that happen.
The PDF files worked.
The article is wrong and misleading. I work for Roche. Posting anon for obvious reasons.
Roche is replacing Exchange Server with Google mail and calendar and the project hasn't even left the pilot phase. That's it. Everyone will still use MS Outlook although Google will be the new web mail interface. Everyone will still use MS Office. Everyone will still use SharePoint. Everyone will still use Lync for IM. Roche is only changing out the back end for mail and calendar.
Genentech, which is a company owned by Roche, uses Google for email and calendar and has done so for some years. They make up about 30K people. But as of now nobody else in Roche or it's other companies is using Google for anything except a handful of pilot users.
There are people in Roche that would like to see us use other Google services like IM, Google drive, Google Apps and that stuff but it's just talk. Nothing has been approved. There aren't any projects in IT moving forward to do any of that. Even if there was it can take years before it reaches production because of the number of validated systems and processes that we have which integrate with MS Office. It would be hard to replace. Hell, we just finished upgrading everybody from XP to Windows 7 and Office 2010 at the end of 2011. We're just now starting to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 from 2003.
Microsoft isn't going away in Roche anytime soon. Roche is so conservative and slow moving that if we ever move everything to Google we will probably be one of the last companies on earth to do it.
Dude don't believe the bullshit. Was MSFT under gates seriously douchey? Yes they were but all they did was kick programs that were already falling down the stairs so they'd fall a little faster.
I actually had both WP and Netscape, in fact until NS 4 I was a DIE HARD NS user. Here let me give you my impression of NS 4: "Alright! I got it installed and am ready to surf the world baby! I'll just go to my favorite site../crash/...huh. Well maybe the site was iffy, I'll just pick one I've surfed a million times with NS 3 and.../NS 4 causes a hard system lock, forcing a reboot/..son of a bitch. Well now that I have my PC up I'll just choose a simple site to../NS 4 causes BSOD/...&%$^$&$!!!! And with WP it was run one instance, pray to God it didn't crash, get halfway through something only to have it crap itself because it was just a DOS program with a DOS for Windows wrapper and when you went to do something like change your volume you had a 50/50 chance of when you switch backed the program would hard lock or crash, and when it did it would nearly always corrupt whatever you were working on.
So I'm sorry you can't blame MSFT for NS 4, nor can you blame them for WP just being a DOS program until nearly 2000. Certainly they weren't being helpful or giving them early access to Windows builds but I can tell you that frankly NS 4 ran like dogshit under DOS as well and WP was a little better in that regard but it was still waaay behind the times. As another pointed out the NS team wouldn't open source NS because they were ashamed of the old code base. I can tell you that I actually had to go and download IE 4 to get it and when I did and was able to surf for a whole hour before it crashed? Well it was like manna from heaven compared to NS 4 which I swear I never did get to read a single article all the way through before it would fuck up somehow.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating.
Exactly and this happened because the suits took over at Word Perfect. If you think about it, they were charging customers nearly thousand dollars per head in today's dollars for a freaking word processor. This left the door wide open for a competitor to undercut them heavily in price and still make a mint.
Which is exactly what Microsoft did to Word Perfect, just like Borland had done to Microsoft in the compiler market a few years earlier. So it wasn't like this was a novel (no pun intended) move. But back then suits just didn't understand the concept of lower prices.
Ironically today they seem incapable of understanding the reverse concept of higher-quality-at-higher-prices which left the door open to Apple's revival to the tune of $500 billion market cap, but I digress...
So, purchasing decisions are made in the interests of simplicity and giving everybody a standard tool to work with, and I'd be surprised if Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements weren't reasonably competitive with this on a per-user basis, especially when you figure in the additional features and functionality available that Google Apps simply doesn't have.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
But it's not true. Office has always been a cash cow, and Microsoft have quite clearly decided that anyone who's buying a site license is ripe for the milking. You can't get any of the cheaper "versions aimed at someone who might otherwise go for OpenOffice" under site licensing, which means you have to get the expensive versions with all the features, including those you might not want.
You've never seen it properly implemented? Are you kidding? Has *anyone* seen Sharepoint properly implemented? *Can* anyone implement Sharepoint properly? All positive I hear about Sharepoint is akin to: "Sharepoint is great because of X, Y and Z! Unfortunately you need a team bigger than your current development team just to do less than you currently do! Yay!" Of course, most of the people who push it are Microsoft crackheads...
The success cases for Sharepoint are slow and fragile web sites. It is simply the latest Microsoft sham for deluding irresponsible CEOs into tying their companies to them.
Nonsense about usage. I adore Outlooks task manager integration with the calendar. The ability to create tasks with dependencies, show them in Gantt format, have them automatically schedule and be integrated with coworkers is far far beyond anything gmail does.
Another area is OLE based editing of email. That allows for vastly more complex email than gmail.
Public folders are managed databases with full ability to set backup and retention policies.
Automatic disclosure detection and warnings for users which help be compliant with things like HIIPA. On the other direction the ability to flag messages to particular legal holds.
There just is no comparison between the feature set of Gmail and Outlook. Sure Google is good at search. That's a nice feature. That is one advantage among whole areas where Google doesn't even offer a product.
Hum... WP are currently suing MSFT arguing exactly that MS is the one that delayed their Windows version of WP untill near 2000.
Rethinking email