Google killed the desktop star
Ingredients. One browser, an internet connection and voila! Instant office. Google Apps Premium edition. Is this the Microsoft killer we all have been waiting for?
Yup, in our constant endeavor to create catchy headlines, this one seemed the most apt. While the OS wars and the browser wars were raging, Google stealthily crept in and built a slew of services that we have now taken for granted and have become dependant on. Their philosophy was simple, you can keep your desktop, but we will own the webtop.
Enter Google enterprise applications.
Now for a low price of just $50 per user, your company can have access to the typical set of applications most companies will need to conduct their day to day operations.
Just a quick list of what you get:
- Email - 10 GB per user! And Blackberry support.
- Google Talk - IM Messaging. Simple and powerful, and no extra clutter that comes with the msn messenger bloat-ware
- Google Calendar - Brilliant calendaring system with discussion and mapping capabilities. Try doing that with outlook!
- Google Doc - Online word. It works great, but advanced formatting can be a bit of an issue. will be more than enough for 95% of the users anyways who don’t need very advanced feature set.
- Spreadsheet - Like Google Docs, this is the weakest of the lot. Will be hard convincing a lot of people to move away from excel, the only application from microsoft that is unbeatable. But if you just need the basics then this will do the trick. The pros of both the docs and spreadsheets is the collaboration feature which is brilliant! This is one feature Microsoft will be working very hard on to catch up if it wants to maintain its lead in the biz apps market.
- A control panel for management
- Google page creator for web page publishing. This is probably ok for the mom and pop operations but not as effective for the enterprise.
Overall a good feature set, which will only get better with time. What is the really important and killer feature here is the price. $50 per user compared to $300 for office per user. Add on all the support costs, hardware, maintenance and hosting etc. and that costs starts to balloon up. Not to mention the nightmares when things break down, and trust me, we have had some sleepless nights because of our dependency internal servers. Just the cost of one systems admin per year works out to $50,000 a year, which is the equivalent to a 1,000 users. Even if Microsoft were to give their products for free it would still be more expensive than the Google offering.
What is interesting is that Proctor and Gamble are taking the dive with Google to deploy this in a test scenario with their company to see the effectiveness of the new service. And they are not alone. GE, L’Oreal and many more are taking the leap. So if these giants can take the initiative, I don’t see why other companies cant follow suit. I hope mine does.
Now for the flip side! We are going to make sure that over the next few months we will be working with the APIs that Google has released so that our products can work in conjunction with their systems. We have a few ideas in store that can greatly benefit from the services available that will add value to our offerings. All I can say is watch this space.
comments
Magnus
February 26th, 2007 at 5:36 pmWe’ve been using the free Google Apps for Domain for quite a while it’s a really neat service. I assume the for-pay service is going to increase that value considerably.
I like the net as much as anyone, but the one thing that worries me about this Google thing is that I still want local copies that I can work on if I don’t have net access. That’s not something they offer, right? And off-line version with automatic sync.
dotone
February 27th, 2007 at 7:58 amSame here Magnus, at d&l we’ve been using Google Apps for Domains as part of our Office 2.0 setup. As for syncing, We sync our Outlook calendars with GCal, and use the POP version of Gmail for emails to sync and guess what, all that is in sync with our mobiles as well. A three way syncing.
All this syncing dancing is just what the third tier has caused, the online versions, since we’re not online all the way and everywhere. The day 3G prices goes lower the Middle Tier(local desktop software) will die. Or let alone fully WiFi covered cities.
Although we’ve been using the whole Google stuff, I tell ya what, I still have love for MS Office and I wanna’ wait for the “live” version of their offerings.
Dinesh Lalvani
February 27th, 2007 at 9:33 amI tried using the new office online calendar system, and you just have to compare it to GCal and see how simple and intuitive Googles offering is in comparison. The big problem with microsoft is that they constantly need to bloat the software when over 95% of the users just want the basics to work and work really well.
Mazen
March 12th, 2007 at 7:10 pmAdobe are smart enough to capture the trend; Adobe Remix (online basic video editing tool like windows movie maker) and Adobe Photoshop online version will limit the competitors’ (flickr, and google’s picassa) chances since people will go for their natural preference.
When will Microsoft ever acknowledge the impotance of free tools and open online tools? If they even had a concept of developing an online basic version of Office, I am sure google would not have offered it.
Joe
May 14th, 2007 at 2:10 pmOnline will always have a risks regardless of how sexy or great the offer is.
I run 4 personal websites, and I personally download .SQL backups daily because of past experiences with lost backups, or an power failures which might torch your data to hell.
MS offerings are corporate wide and are usually extremely well integrated with other platforms. In addition, with the release of Office 11, the interoperability APIs are available to the public to code online and off-line compatible components/applications. It’s just up to people to take initiative.
Just look at the calendars offered by Infragistics for .NET development. It’s a full world of development waiting for someone to grasp it. You’re blaming MS? No. Blame the lazy consumer because open source was always the people never the corporation.
Just a thought