Submitted by Despite holding grassroots appeal among guerrilla IT workers fed up with IT’s sluggish responses to their requests, Google Apps’ traction in the enterprise remains overblown. Sure, Google claims more than 500,000 companies have signed up for Google Apps, but according to Gartner, only a handful of employees at each company uses the tools. Comparing that with Microsoft Office’s 500 million users, Garnter analyst Tom Austin calls Google Apps’ cloud-computing impression on the enterprise ‘a raindrop.’
Sorry, All the talk about web apps over taking desktop apps has always been ridiculous from the start. It’s always been about senseless speculation while every reason in the book can be thrown against it. Security, thinking people will leave personal PCs, etc… they’re all ridiculous. I should abandon using a PC that can play h264 video and edit high resolution images for some web terminal that can’t? Then the quality compared to native is always terrible. If you want web apps that would be remotely useful you would at least need a way of writing files to the users hard drive, and the only way of that is to use something like java.
And it’s not like hardware acceleration is going to ever be reasonable either.
Edited 2008-07-03 20:19 UTC
Thank you! I thought I was the only person in the world that thinks this online office application or an online OS talk is stupid. Technically impressive, but still stupid.
Mobility, perhaps?
It’s not desktop quality, but when I’m in a new place, I don’t want to setup my pop3, install my office tools, and copy the data from my usb key and then start work. I want to launch whatever browser is available and start work. Then I don’t want to deal with backups and security. Google does that for me. I only want to do the actual work wherever I am.
It’s not desktop quality, but it is available everywhere. Look at the webmail. How many people are still using thunderbird or outlook these days? Those who need the extra functionality, but for the other 90%, webmail is quite enough and available here, there and over there. How many people need to put highres videos on their documents? Not me actually. My documents are very simple and Google apps is more enough for my needs.
MS Office (or OpenOffice) and Google Apps don’t compete but rather complement each other quite nicely. Google Apps is for the web and MS Office for offline work.
Like the article says Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta is the competing solution from MS – but still far from being as mature as Google Apps is.
I know many work places where they happily use both MS Office and Google Apps together. And Google Apps are used a lot too – if and when there is a real need for such web-based tools. Why else would MS be developing its own competing solution now?
Edited 2008-07-03 21:02 UTC
Google Apps won’t be “mature” until people really start using it. And, no, people aren’t really using it yet in significant numbers.
Edited 2008-07-03 22:45 UTC
Well, it depends, and naturally Google Apps is still young and a new thing indeed. Maybe it has not been useful for your company and business sector (yet?), but Google Apps is already used a lot where I work at, for example, so it is certainly mature and useful for us. And like I said, I know many other similar work places where they already use Google Apps a lot too.
open yourself to the one you want, http://www.fitnessloving.com give you a plat.
Could someone please get rid of this guy and his online brothel!!
It’s a spambot, just bury its posts
One way I see Google making inroads into the current enterprise ecosystem is if they can make it easy to publish MS Office documents to Google Docs. in 2007 and 2003 as well I guess, there is the ability to “Publish” a document to a “workspace” like sharepoint or webdav. I have always wondered, how I could point it to Google Apps.