Google Apps Slow to Replace Competition 144
ericatcw brings us a Computerworld article about how businesses are still hesitant to switch to Google Apps as an alternative to Microsoft Office. While a Google spokesman claims "millions of active users", only "several thousand organizations" have paid for the Premier service, which was launched earlier this year. From Computerworld:
"'If we deploy it correctly, Google Docs can replace some [of] our Office apps -- but not all of them,' said Les Sease, IT director of Prudential Carolina Real Estate in North Charleston, South Carolina. Sease would like to switch everyone over completely to Google Apps. But first he would like to see better synchronization between Google Apps and mobile devices, shared online file storage similar to that of Apple Inc.'s .Mac, as well as a simple desktop publishing tool similar to Microsoft Publisher."
bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not to mention the security and privacy implications of having multiple large organizations and, eventually, private individuals moving all of their e-mail and documents onto Google servers.
Are we so in love with the concept of web apps that we're forgetting we'd have to hand more our personal lives over to corporate entities? Do we truly have "nothing to hide"?
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I told my freak employers: we could continue to use our email addresses and have it all hosted for free using google apps. I was promptly told we were a microsoft only company. Bah, fools.
They are currently trying to get quotes for managed exc
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Bah, fools.
Indeed.
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Methinks they'd be anti-OSS pirates, no?
Re:bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, it could, but given the face Google would lose, it seems unlikely they would suddenly pull it.
More likely, they would announce end-of-life months in advance and provide migration tools to popular alternatives.
Not to mention, you can always, well, download all your mail, documents, calendar items, etc.
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>it seems unlikely
>More likely,
Definitely not an acceptable answer to business critical functions.
>Not to mention, you can always, well, download all your mail, documents, calendar items, etc.
You have X employees with Y number of documents/calenders holding business critical data/information. Not only would it cost alot (at the very least employee time lost in the transition) but who is going to check that its correct?
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How many software companies in business in 1998 are still around? There are web sites with tons of "abandonware".
I played a "mmorg" called "earth and beyond". It was nice. It had about 10,000-20,000 users so it was grossing about 150,000-300,000 a month ($1.8 to $3.6million a year). EA shut it down. They didn't even put it in steady state on one server.
Google will shut this down if it is not profit
Re:bad idea (Score:4, Informative)
FUD.
Sure, it could, but given the face Google would lose, it seems unlikely they would suddenly pull it.
Exactly. That's like saying Google would launch a service where you could buy videos and then a year or two later pull the service so you can't watch those videos any more.
With a company with the size and profile of Google, that just aint going to happen.
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FUD.
Sure, it could, but given the face Google would lose, it seems unlikely they would suddenly pull it.
Exactly. That's like saying Google would launch a service where you could buy videos and then a year or two later pull the service so you can't watch those videos any more.
With a company with the size and profile of Google, that just aint going to happen.
I'm assuming you're being sarcastic and suggesting Google screwed its customers after it closed its video store. However, Google "saved face" [arstechnica.com] by giving full refunds for those videos and keeping its DRM service alive for another six months.
Given Google's actions after closing their video store, I think The Clockwork Troll makes a good point in the part of the comment you left out:
More likely, they would announce end-of-life months in advance and provide migration tools to popular alternatives.
Not to mention, you can always, well, download all your mail, documents, calendar items, etc.
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If you have an appliance storing its data on seperate file servers, you can still use your local apps too...
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OOooooh, lovely idea, so they can sell you a little server that they buy for pennies on the dollar in bulk, stick some labels on them, image them and then sell them.
Why they can even build in the price of development and a small profit. They can appear to be less evil than a (no names please) large software company selling their office suite by download or disc. They can even portion them into strict service levels like : small for $2000.00, medium for $4000.00 and enterprise for $49,995.00.
Then in 5 year
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But that's why I mentioned using an external standard file server, and storing the data there in standard formats. When the appliance is EOL, you can buy an update or switch it out for something else. I want the choice, and i have no problem using a proprietary
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Not dropping office, but definately using goffice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not dropping office, but definately using goffi (Score:2)
The idea you need "full-time IT" for most Microsoft products is a fallacy.
Re:Not dropping office, but definately using goffi (Score:2)
A home user on broadband has a lot of dedicated bandwidth for himself, so he can use online apps at a fairly good clip. Small offices have to SHARE a T1 or DSL line which will be absolutely s
Competition? (Score:2)
As far as they are concerned they are only in competition with online Office Apps.
wink,wink.
Too many of us are weary of loosing are data to the wild. However, I am not averse to uploading something to DOCs that was composed offline, to be picked up at the conference. Laptop, USB Key, Google Docs. Gmail. All bases covered.
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Their competition has barely started.
The problem Google Apps and similar online suites are going to run into is that it's easy to develop special-purpose document creation tools with OpenLaszlo [openlaszlo.org] and similar dev tools.
At the moment, it makes sense to use a stand-alone office suite because even just writing the most common document format requires heavy code and resources. Once ODF becomes ubiquitous, it'll make more sense to equip users with tools appropriate to the
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Yes, or the additional risk of leaking that data to whoever is hosting the service. Examples of things I would never store on someone else's servers (let alone my own Internet accessible servers): company secrets, patent ideas, IPO details, or customer lists.
Normally a company has to worry about its own employees leaking data - that's a given - but if you host private data with some other company I believe you're extending the possibility of breach u
Makes sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
On an aside, I'm tired of sites relying more and more on AJAX and CSS to generate/render pages, as web-based applications must. Slashdot renders noticeably more slowly with its new CSS-based layout than its old primarily HTML-based layout.
Re:Makes sense... (Score:5, Funny)
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Google Docs slow (Score:2)
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Re:Makes sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Course, I wouldn't use the Doc or Spreadsheet apps myself, for the same reason.. not fast enough yet. (Also: not featurefull-enough, yet.)
Gmail on the other hand is plenty fast for my needs.
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But my real point was exactly what you state: web based interfaces will always be inherently slower than traditional ones.
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possibly DEC Alpha, but not x86 (Score:4, Informative)
For pete's sake, two HUNDRED MHz? I had a faster computer than that in 1996. You're not the typical user, or even in the ballpark.
The Pentium Pro peaked at 200MHz.
The Pentium peaked at 233MHz, but that chip was not released until June 2, 1997 [wikipedia.org]
The Pentium II debuted at 233MHz, on May 7, 1997 [wikipedia.org].
By the way, for the original poster: For mere pocketchange, many, many "Socket 6" motherboards can be upgraded to 500MHz [or higher] with a K6-2 [or, in some instances, a K6-3]:
On the other hand, if you're running a Pentium Pro at 200MHz, then there was an upgrade part to 333MHz, called the "OverDrive"; here's a guy who appears to be selling one of them for $15.99:
Now as far as being the "typical" user, I've got some older Socket 6 motherboards [some of them Intel TX chipsets, others VIA chipsets] which, with 500MHz K6-2's, can still handle most of the stuff I throw at them, although, admittedly, AJAX, Flash, and Acrobat Reader can be a pain in some web pages [particularly in poorly coded pages, like the "New & Improved" Slashdot, which can produce some really awful hangs with its sloppy Javascript].
Personally, I've often thought that the Socket 6's potential for a five-fold [or, in some cases, greater than five-fold] increase in speeds [when upgrading from circa 100MHz, to circa 500MHz] was, dollar for dollar, the greatest value in the history of the Personal Computer.
To get the equivalent bang for the buck nowadays, there would need to be a roughly 3GHz motherboard on the market already, which, five or ten years from now, would be capable of an upgrade to 15GHz.
And I just don't see that happening.
About the most you might hope for is that some single-core motherboards could get upgraded to maybe quad or octal cores, but I kinda doubt you'll have much luck with that.
You're exceptionally lucky if a really outstanding board, like an older Tyan, is capable of upgrading from single-core to [merely] dual-core.
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I owned Socket 7 mainboards
I had a K6-2 with the wonderful multiplier 2x = 6x that AMD was kind enough to offer.
I upgraded from Pentium nonMMX 100mhz to K6-2 500mhz @ 6x 83mhz 460mhz
on a terrible board with max multiplier 3.5 or Pentium 233.
Yes, Socket 7, not Socket 6 (Score:2)
Socket 7
You're right - sorry, it was late at night & thanks for the correction. [I think I must have been getting "K6" & "K7" mixed up with "Socket 7" & the "Socket 6" which my imagination appears to have invented.]
the wonderful multiplier 2x = 6x
Yes, dollar for dollar, possibly the single greatest innovation in the entire history of the Personal Computer.
Because of that multiplier, I haven't had to upgrade any of the word-processing desktops or SOHO firewall/routers around here FOR 1
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By the way, for the original poster: For mere pocketchange, many, many "Socket 6" motherboards can be upgraded to 500MHz [or higher] with a K6-2 [or, in some instances, a K6-3]
Hard to do on a laptop (which is what he said he was using). I have a similar machine myself which also runs a 400MHz mobile Pentium 2 on a Sony PCG-C1XD PictureBook [cowboyneal.org] (similar model on the cowboyneal site). The battery life kind of sucks (especially since I now have a dead battery) but it's a fun little machine that was quite popular.
I intend to revive it one of these days with a more modern distro (currently running an old Mandrake).
K6-2's & K6-3's in Pentium Laptops (Score:2)
First of all, I went back and looked at his comment [slashdot.org], and I didn't see anything about a "laptop".
Having said that, though, I have no experience with putting K6-2's or K6-3's in Pentium Laptops.
If there isn't any underlying BIOS/system obstacle which can't be surmounted [to include whether the laptop can actually be "unscrewed" to get at its motherboard (& CPU), or whether the whole thing is permanently glued/welded shut], then the only other really obvious problem would be whether a housing which wa
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Anyway laptop CPUs were often welded to the motherboard at the time, changing them wasn't practical. Probably still isn't for that matter.
I'll have to try the Google apps on my PictureBook some day to see whether they're usable. I recall that StarOffice ran more or less ok at the time (I have 192Megs of RAM on that machine)
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Christ, you must be fun at parties.
IF your motherboard can support it... (Score:2)
Consider socket 775. The first processors for that came out in december 2004, clocked at around 2.6ghz. Replace that with a 3ghz quad core.
IF you've got a quality motherboard from a quality manufacturer [like Tyan - maybe Intel or ASUS] & they bother to issue whatever BIOS upgrades might be necessary to support it.
Remember, by issuing those BIOS upgrades, they lose money not once, but twice:
1) First they have to put big $$$'s into paying the salaries of the guys who write & test [both develop
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Yeah, I gave the google apps a test drive last week, and although the word processor seemed fine on my (relatively recent) hardware, the spreadsheet was just pathetically slow. All that could change, though, when the Tamarin [wikipedia.org] JIT compiler for javascript gets incorporated into Firefox.
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Personally, I take 5-10 < P3s to the computer recycler per month and usually a couple of lower-end P3s. Might I suggest to all of you ninnies running your Pentium Pros that you hang out in front of your local compu
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Seriously, though, my 200 mhz Pentium isn't my primary machine by a long shot... It's a Sony ultralight PCG-505g laptop that I purchased for $30. See [slashdot.org] details [slashdot.org]. I only use it for notetaking and occasional web browsing. My quad Xeon is the machine that sees far more usage.
Ironically, I'm 16 years old... has my cantankerousness already peaked?
As for my original point, one user wrote rather succinctly, "If your dumb terminal has to be smarter
Domains Apps better (Score:5, Interesting)
The online Doc/Spreadsheet/Presentation apps, though, I have absolutely no interest in. The features simply aren't there; neither is the responsiveness. OpenOffice will work just fine for us; I plan to push for a switch to that over the next year.
What? (Score:2)
Google Apps is an impressive demo of what AJAX can do. Nothing more.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the internet-thingy going down is a downside but I noticed that wherever I work, if the Internet goes down, the company grinds to a halt, even for people that aren't really involved on the internet for business (why does the cleaning crew or even hr need internet access anyway?)
And hardly anybody in a company uses all the functionality that MS Office, OpenOffice or iWork has to offer. For those people, you can stick to buying them the Office suite but for a lot (maybe 90%) just typing in a document or setting up a spreadsheet is as far as their business-related computer work goes.
And as for the 'cheap' part: $50/user/year for a full (or somewhat full) functional office package that is accessible anywhere with collaboration and central storage is fairly cheap. Just the licensing costs for Office are higher even for educational and then you haven't even started setting up ShitPoint, Dead Office Collaborator or a simple file storage for each department.
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But then, I assume that like most slashdot posters, you don't have any real experience in the problem domain about which you are commenting.
I've been dropping Google (Score:1)
I've already successfully moved away from its e-mail (instead using one I've set up for my own use). However does anyon
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Google Apps replace Paper - not MSOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
I would point out that Google Docs could become legally binding as there is a mechanism to certify their content and date, and perhaps if Google adds identity verification like amazon's realid or so, on-line documents could replace paper docs - in business filings, contracts, perhaps even court filings.
I would advise Google to look for paper-intensive markets and provide the full cycle of services of the paper-world. Proof of service, by snail-mail if necessary, shredding, archiving, redlining. I would advise "templates" for document-intensive transactions such as buying/selling a house, car, small business, in which filing the document with the state agencies is part of the process.
The strength of the web is integrated services, not speed for a solo user. Google Docs should target a very specific niche - Wordperfect is still a favorite for lawyers (IIRC), Google should target collaboration-intensive markets, like education, conventions etc
I must say one problem seems to be an inability to link documents. One spreadsheet can't refer to another - can a powerpoint include a live graph linked to an online spreadsheet?
AIK
The cold, hard truth (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong; I like the idea behind Google Apps, and with some work I think they could be a contender for MS Office and OO. However, they still need a lot of work. The "Word Processor" is nothing more than a basic html editor; its functionality is roughly on par with WordPad. The Presentation and Spreadsheet apps seem a bit farther along, but they still have a ways to go.
What I do like about it:
So it's got potential, IMO, and with some work it very well could be a contender. But it's not there yet. Google needs to stop, look harder at the functionality of the office suites already out there, and focus on enhancements to bring it up to date. Then in a year or two, they'll be in a better spot to compete with OO or MS Office.
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Its not the features that bother me its that googleapps is a clunky, slow peice of crap which a spreadsheet program or a wordpresser should not be on a p4-3ghz with a gig a ram.
I have a spread sheet 5 columns wide and 2500 rows deep and it takes over a minute to load and even sort the fields and then it takes forever to contact the server to do its periodical updates.
But I guess you have to expect that from
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A little open source competition. (Score:1)
Read Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's exactly the same with Google Apps and Free Open Source Software and the OLPC XO. They all underperform Microsoft apps, but they appeal to a different crowd. No analysis of Google Apps or FOSS or the OLPC XO is on the right track without looking at one key question: who are the best customers of these technologies? If they are the same group as the market leader, then they will fail for exactly the same reason that Walt Mossberg doesn't like Ubuntu: he says that he reviews products for mainstream consumers, and FOSS is just now starting to get to feature parity with Microsoft products.
And yet, boatloads of people are starting to buy FOSS-powered products. Sure, they are much smaller boarts than the boatloads of people buying Microsoft products, but the point is that people are PAYING for FOSS goods and services.
The best example is Google search. Google "rents" Linux to us all 1/10th of a second at a time. Google sells advertising, and so they commoditize the compliment: web traffic. Google is more concerned with keeping the Internet Free and Open than they are concerned with what platform you use to browse the Internet, at least until Microsoft locks down the browser and blocks out Google, which they are trying to do with "LiveSearch" (an effort that is failing).
,
Bottom line: if you want to understand why FOSS and Google will beat Microsoft, look at the customers who are using their products. They are not Microsoft's customers. At least not yet. But tomorrow they will be.
Oh, and BTW, when was the last time you bought an RCA product? What about a Sony product? Yet when Sony was young, it was mocked as "cheap Japanese crap." Think of that next time someone mocks Google Apps.
Re:Read Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma (Score:3, Insightful)
So do many failed innovations.
"They laughed at Columbus. They also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Re:Read Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma (Score:4, Informative)
Your response is a misdirection. The point that I am making here is that the mere fact that a product or service underperforms today is not always good evidence of its future performance. The point is to look at the product, its vendor, and how the vendor is positioning the product in the market. If the vendor does a good job of matching a product or a service to the proper customer base, they can succeed. The theory of disruptive innovation helps us answer a key question: how is it that so many great companies have failed?
Before Christensen, the answer was that management failed to follow the needs of their current customers. Christensen shifted the focus by helping to identify the relationship between great companies and emerging demographics. Google is a great company today because it saw that you don't try to sell Linux to the same customers who buy Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office the same way that Microsoft sells those products: in a desktop computer or notebook used by power users. At least not at first. Instead, rent Linux to them 1/10th of a second at a time.
My point exactly. At one time, steel production in North America was dominated by large integrated steel mills. They produced all types of steel, from rebar at the bottom, to sheet metal at the top. Then along came mini-mills. They used recycled steel, rather than raw ore, to create steel. But they were not able to produce blemish-free steel, no matter how hard they tried. So, rather than compete with the integrated mills for the production of the high margin sheet metal, they produced rebar, because surface blemished don't matter for rebar. Eventually, the mini-mills were able to produce rebar at prices that the integrated mills couldn't match, so the integrated mills exited the rebar market.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because rebar customers are disloyal, price-sensitive customers. But more and more mini-mills sprung up, and the price of rebar collapsed, as the mini-mills fought with each other over price. So the smart managers of the mini-mills focused on creating steel for angle iron, which requires slightly better surface quality than rebar, but still far less quality than structural steel or sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the angle iron market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because now angle iron customers had become disloyal, price-sensitive customers. Mini-mills turned to the production of angle iron by the droves, and the price of angle iron collapsed. So smart managers of the mini-mills turned to structural steel, which requires slightly better surface quality than angle iron, but far less than sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the structural steel market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
This time, their investors did not rejoice.
The pattern was becoming clear. Large, integrated mills had huge cost structures, and they could not compete with the mini-mills on price, but the mini-mills were showing no end to their ability to produce high quality steel out of low-grade raw materials. The big mills were hugely expensive, required huge labor pools to run. Not a single integrated mill has been built in North America since the mid-seventies as a result, and all the dominant integrated mills have closed.
Microsoft employs 70,000 people, and has a market capitalization of about $335 billion as of the market's close today. Google has a market capitalization of about $216 billion
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No, it is a response to your (false) implication that Google Apps are like the transistor radio - wildly sucessful because it filled it a niche market with little competition. I then go further and show how that 'sucess' is actually quite limited, as invariably the product is discarded for another as the customer ages.
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The trouble is that you're not making that point. If you had wanted to make that point, you would have given examples of successes (sony) as well as examples of failure (forgotten company), *and* pointed out that statistically the failures are much more common than the successes. Instead, you only mentioned a
Re:Read Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma (Score:1)
yeah, MP3s...without Microsoft DRM... (Score:2)
My point exactly. And very few of those kids are using Microsoft's DRM'd solutions. Microsoft's business partners, the big record labels, are losing their revenue base. Magn
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Now it is merely mocked as "crap"
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Re:Read Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma (Score:2)
1) Sony is "cheap Japanese crap." Ignoring all the political reasons not to buy Sony (the rootkits, the crazy DRM schemes), I've never seen a Sony DVD player last longer than 2 months. And that's three players owned by three different users. (Given, two were the same model.) Maybe Sony's high-end equipment
I actually prefer OpenOffice.org, but... (Score:2)
Nice for certain things (Score:4, Interesting)
I use Gmail, but as some others have stated, it seems to be getting slower and slower to load with all the features they've crammed into it.
Now I have found Google apps useful if someone sends me an excel file that needs to be converted to a CSV and uploaded to a database. I can do that without having to load Excel or even download the file to my computer. I can do everything right in the browser.
However, I have to always be online to use it. Sometimes I'm somewhere, like Barnes and Noble, where wifi isn't free. Same thing with my hotel the other night. They were having internet issues. If I had to rely on Google Apps I would have been screwed as I needed to make some last minute changes to a presentation.
I find it a useful repository for documents, etc. that I may need access to on another machine, but it's not going to replace MS Office and iWork anytime soon for me.
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Gmail basic is fast enough without the bloat.
I use google apps for my family with my own domain.
I wanted to build a customized PDF-linked page as homepage, but saw that apps do not allow the same.
Since i used dotMac services, i ended up redirecting my homepage to dotmac.
Problem is google apps is suprisingly immature yet.
Seems to me like gOffice is doing very well (Score:3, Interesting)
To me, millions of users, and thousands of organization paying for premium service; seems like amazing progress against a ruthless monopoly like msft.
If msft ever gets down to 75% of the office app market, then msft will not be able dictate "standards." I think that may be why msie8 is actually supposed to use real standards.
What is the increase in internet bound bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is the increase in internet bound bandwidt (Score:1)
Sharepoint? (Score:3, Interesting)
A bunch of people upthread have made the point that the cool part of Google Apps is more about collaboration than trying to be an 'Office Killer', and I tend to agree. Sharepoint in a lot of ways is MS's answer to that office worker collaboration question. (I've heard a lot of people bitch about earlier versions of Sharepoint, not so much the most recent, but I've barely touched it so I don't feel qualified to say if it's crap or not or how it does or doesn't stack up to Google's premium offering.)
Impressions so far (Score:3, Insightful)
Gmail works great, no question about it. The rest of the office apps, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. The biggest hurdle to its practical business use is really easy to fix. The problem is that goog aps doesn't let you share arbitrary file formats with other users. It's nice that goog aps recognizes (or attempts to) a lot different file formats, but it should at least allow users to upload and share formats it doesn't recognize. So to share, for example, a zip file, we're reduced to emailing it to colleagues. This is clearly a messy solution for a business.
That is, for the thing to work, it's gotta have some semblance of a file system, for god's sake.. What on earth are these googs thinking? I wonder.
Intranets (Score:4, Insightful)
Very convenient (Score:1)
Because they're slow to fix problems? (Score:2)
Meanwhile, a month or more later, its still not fixed even though Google acknowledges its broken. This leads me to two questions/conclusions -- did they even TEST it with anything, including the wildly popular (if not market leading) WM5 & 6 handhelds? IIRC the forums are a
Web Browser the new EMACS (Score:2)
It's still beta! (Score:2)
That said, it works. I've used it, though I don't use it. I'm done buying MS products, and I think Google Docs helps make that easier. There are a lot of people in the world who just need slightly better than a text editor and a way to publish it on the interweb. Google Docs provides that and it's free which is awesome, and simple which is also awesome.
See it for wha
not everyone wants to use their bandwidth that way (Score:2)
I think the migration needs to happen in an office place first before it starts to happen at home.
google apps for private data? (Score:2)
Most corporations have strict policies about not allowing proprietary information travel along any external transmission lines. A company like Prudential would certainly use an office suite for documents containing customer info, so they would never be able to switch completely to google apps. I'm pretty sure that transferring such customer data to google would even be against the la
NYTimes comes to the opposite conclusion (Score:2)
Re:this doesn't surprise me (Score:4, Insightful)
Are there ANY companies left for which that isn't already the case? OK, actual manufacturing maybe. They can go off and manufacture stuff, or whatever.
But anyone with a desk job requires the Internet. Your customers use email; your coworkers use email; everyone uses Google search. Our company grinds to a halt and starts pounding on the IT lady's door every time the Internet goes down in the office. (Not often, fortunately.)
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Re:this doesn't surprise me (Score:4, Insightful)
And if you use a email client like Lotus Notes (which has replication) or Microsoft Outlook (which has offline folder storage), you can still access your calendar, email, address book, etc. without the network. You can write emails and have them sent when you're connected again; you can delete/move things and have the changes synchronized when you're reconnected.
If you're using gmail, good luck.
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Oh, yeah, and I want Jingle support in some (any!!!) Jabber client so I can do voice/video.
And a pony! I really want a pony!
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I'm not sure from your comment whether you already know about this, but Google Calendar does have a read/write API that uses its general data API scheme. The Google Calendar provider for Mozilla Thunderbird [mozilla.org] uses this API and allows you to create new appointments in Thunderbird itself.
Jingle support in third-party Jabber clients isn't really Google's problem!
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