Microsoft Office vs. Google Apps: Latest Skirmishes

It may be premature to call the competition between Microsoft Office and Google Apps a war--"spat" might be more accurate as of yet--but whatever it is, it continues to heat up.

Today, Capgemini, the great big global consulting company that works with great big global clients, announced that it'll provide service and support for Google Apps. I chatted with some Capgemini folks about their plans last week, and they said they don't envision big companies dumping Microsoft Office for Apps, but that it can make sense as a complement to Microsoft's wares--especially for companies who have lots of employees who don't have their own PCs (such as workers on factory floors).

I dunno how many of Capgemini's customers will take the plunge, but it's an interesting development--and certainly a sign that Google wants to take the, um, spat to the enterprise front, where so much of Microsoft's profits from Office originate.

And Microsoft has fired back, at least verbally: Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet's All About Microsoft has published a list that Microsoft sent her of ten questions Microsoft says that enterprises should ask themselves before switching to Google Apps Premier Edition. Here's they are.

Many of Microsoft's points are absolutely legitimate. Google Apps isn't a good option for power users (well, at least not as their only suite--but some of the most power-hungry users I know like to use it at least part of the time). It only works when you've got an Internet connection. And it offers no Visual Basic-style programmability or, actually, much in the way of customization features at all.

Others seem like odd issues for Microsoft, of all companies, to bring up, like its criticism of Google for not releasing updates on a known schedule. (Memo to Redmond: Nobody really knowns when you're going to release updates to Office, either.)

Short term, there are at least as many reasons for companies not to use Google Apps--or at least not to bet their business on it--as there are for them to adopt it. Long term, though, there's every reason to think that Office's deskbound foundation is going to feel more and more archaic. And if Google chooses to pour resources into Apps--not a given, although they seem committed to it at the moment--most or all of Microsoft's ten questions will be irrelevant.

In other words, the Microsoft points feel a little like a 2007 edition of the arguments that Wang Labs probably used in the late 1970s to discourage companies from considering PC word processing software such as The Electric Pencil. By the mid-1980s, all the arguments in favor of dedicated word processors had crumbled, and there was nothing the least bit risky about PC-based word processing.

If I were an enterprise Office customer who was considering Apps, I'd ask Google many of the questions Microsoft has so helpfully supplied. But I'd also ask Microsoft why Office, whose roots go back a quarter century, still doesn't have collaboration tools to compare with those in Apps. I'd ask it why Office doesn't have any straightforward way to save documents to the Internet so they're available anywhere. I'd ask it what its plans were for providing a hosted office suite that doesn't require installing a bunch of big fat applications on multiple PCs.

I've said before that I can't tell if Google is committed to Apps, or whether it's simply yanking Microsoft's chain. (We've seen evidence lately that Google isn't above giving up on unsuccessful products even when it causes problems for people who have given it money.) But I have no doubt that Apps represents the future of office-productivity software. Some Web-hosted suite is going to cut dramatically into Office's market share over the next few years...though I'm entirely prepared to believe that it might be a Web-hosted suite from Microsoft that does the job.

Meanwhile, here's a question for you:

Comments

Make Sure You Read the Fine Print before
making a Career (or Income) Limiting Move
- to see why see the article at http://www.pcprofile.com/Office_Collaboration.pdf that I wrote some months ago on the topic.

Great tool, great concept, BUT it has a big downside for the unwary. It's not as plain sailing as many would like to believe.

If you want to share your IP with the rest of the world and have it all over servers everywhere, go for it, but those of us that make a living out of IP matters, it's a real issue.

It's an even bigger issue if you want to have commercial secrets and decide to collaborate using Google Apps, the Ts and Cs will kill you, and not with laughter!

Are you aware that for anything you load up into Google Apps you immediately grant a license to Google to use in any way they so choose? Read their fine print.

Whilst you might own the IP, you are also assigning them rights to it as well!

Is that what you had in mind for confidential documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc?

I suspect not.

Use Google Apps with caution!

PCProfile

September 25, 2007

12:41 AM PT