Earlier this year, Google said that the number of organisations
using
Google Apps had passed the half-million mark, with two- to
three-thousand more signing up every day. The vast majority, the
company admitted, were small- and medium-sized companies, schools
and universities. But there were also some big names on Google's
list: General Electric, L'Oreal, Procter & Gamble.
These are early days. Google began assembling Google Apps in the
summer of 2006, building on the positive response to Gmail. The
paid-for and supported
Premier Edition was launched in February last year. The company
is now trying to build, on the fly, the kind of infrastructure of
partners and services that Microsoft, which claims over 500-million
Office users, took two decades to establish.
The company will not provide a breakdown between users who are
paying for the software (at £25/$50 per user licence: unlike some
of its competitors, Google does not just stick a pound sign in
front of the dollar price), and those who have taken the free
downloads to evaluate.
Those big organisations are a long way from moving their users
from Office to Google Apps. General Electric CTO, Gregory Simpson,
said the company is "evaluating Google Apps for the easy access it
provides to a suite of web applications, and the way these
applications can help people work together". L'Oreal's
international director of information technology, Jean-Paul Beck,
says the cosmetics firm is testing Google Apps "to optimize
collaboration between its researchers". This is less about saving
money on office applications than doing something about Web 2.0,
with the backing of the biggest Web 2.0 brand. Gartner Group says
Google has a two to three year lead over Microsoft in web-based
online collaboration tools.
Google Apps includes Google Docs word processing, spreadsheet
and presentations, Google Calendar, and Gmail, plus Google Sites,
which provides some Sharepoint-like functionality.
Google Gears provides the ability to work offline - one of the
strongest early criticisms of Google Apps was that you could not
use it offline - and synchronise data and content when going online
again.
For smaller users particularly, the appeal is not simply the
price, but the opportunity to hand over support, administration and
storage responsibilities to Google. Administrators are spared the
often-onerous task of tracking and applying security patches, and
bugs can be fixed straight away instead of the fixes being saved up
and delivered as service packs. New features can appear overnight
they can also disappear, although Google is far from the first
supplier to test new features on live customers. And everybody is
using the same version, so there should be no compatibility
problems, and no disruptive roll-outs of upgrades.
Data is stored in the "cloud", something unlikely to be
acceptable to large enterprises, with their regulatory compliance
responsibilities, for a long time yet. However, as well as
appealing to SMEs, this simplifies life for mobile users, who have
direct access to the same data everyone else is using, without
synchronisation problems. Journalists working for Mondadori are
already using Google Apps on their travels.
The most serious long-term threat to Microsoft Office may come
from the change in consciousness among students and schoolchildren.
One of the reasons people do not consider alternatives to Microsoft
Office is that UK schools have made Microsoft's applications
synonymous with IT skills. Children learn word-processing using
Word. When he moved up to secondary school, my son was told that
PowerPoint was a "learning skill" he would need to acquire.
Microsoft's classroom dominance came under threat when the
British Educational Communications and Technology Agency announced
last year that
upgrading to Vista and Office 2007 was not recommended, because
it would increase costs and create software compatibility problems,
while providing little benefit. BECTA said that instead, schools
and colleges should make pupils, teachers and parents aware of
free-to-use products.
Some schools have already taken that advice. Dan Leighton is
head of IT at Cottenham Village College in Cambridgeshire, a
secondary school with around 1050 registered users, which moved to
Google Apps last year. "We had the whole thing set up in about six
man hours spread across a week." Leighton says it is
"ultra-reliable", with no "arbitrary and restrictive" limits on
space or attachment size. "It does everything Outlook and Exchange
does, and it is free."
Microsoft Office has little appeal to parents and other
consumers: it can double the cost of a home PC. People are using
Google Apps at home, and on their iPhones, then continuing to use
it when they get into the office, side by side with Microsoft
applications.
"Google Apps' key strength is its cost its weakness is
functionality," says Laurent Lachal, Ovum's open source research
director. But he adds that Microsoft's online version,
Office Live Workspaces, is even more limited. And in line with
Microsoft's "software and services" rather than "software as a
service" approach, you will have to have an Office licence to get
anything other than read-only access.
Perhaps there is too much concern about functionality, when the
real day-to-day needs of users are pretty basic. As analyst Robin
Bloor put it when Google Apps Premium Edition was launched,
"Microsoft Office is ridiculously over-featured. For 50% of users,
if not 80%, Google Apps will be good enough." Now, wasn't there
another software company that built an empire on products that were
"good enough"?