The argument for reconsidering Microsoft Office   |  November 8, 2007  

Google Apps is not an Office competitor, Google insists. But it's hard not to see the two going head to head, and to see Apps winning

Google Apps landed like a rock in a still pond in August 2006. It offered e-mail, shared calendaring, instant messaging and VoIP. Word processing and spreadsheets followed, and the company just added Presentation, essentially PowerPoint Light.

This is all free and Google says it always will be. The company claimed 100,000 small businesses were using Apps in the first six months of availability.

A second rock followed in February 2007 with the launch of Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). GAPE added 10GBs of online storage per user; programming interfaces so companies can build in provisioning, single sign-on, etc.; 24x7 tech support; and no Google Ads. The cost: $50 per user per year.

All of which has business people asking a good question: why buy Microsoft Office?

Google: don't miss the point

A competitive analysis is the wrong way to think about Apps, Google insists, because the two models are different. Microsoft grew up in a world of isolated personal computers and has had to add in some Web-connected functions; Apps is an Internet baby raised on the cloud computing or Software as a Service model.

“Comparing us to Office is similar to the PC/mainframe computer situation,” said Dave Girouard, Google vice president and general manager, enterprise. “Mainframes haven’t gone away but a lot of what happened in the late ’80s and ’90s happened in the PC world. Similarly, Office is not going away but the most interesting things now are occurring in the cloud.”

True, but CTOs and CFOs look at competitive pros and cons when making buying decisions. Google acknowledges that, when pressed. “There are competitive analogies in the sense that a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. But to say ‘It’s us against Office’ is to put us into the way people have always thought about this, which is a feature checklist. But we are not replicating the scenarios that Microsoft does very well today. If you’re a financial analyst doing heavy number crunching you should use Excel, but you don’t need Excel for every business scenario involving numbers.”

Good point. So what criteria should businesses use to evaluate GAPE?

The pros and cons list

1. Software cost. GAPE is $50 annually per user. A full copy of Office Small Business Edition is $600, and volume licensing is not going to close that gap. The Burton Group estimates GAPE’s per-year cost is 17 per cent of the total Office cost. Winner: Google.

2. Support cost. Companies hire expensive tech support staff to, in part, help employees with Office; GAPE’s $50 fee includes tech support. Consider that one techie’s $50,000 salary would buy 1,000 GAPE licences. Winner: Google.

3. Productivity. Employees who need tech support are not being productive; software that is simpler to use causes fewer problems. Winner: Google.

4. Features. Microsoft Office is far more feature rich. Winner: Microsoft, for power users.

5. Risk. The mantra used to be “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Now it’s Microsoft, and an executive sticks out his/her neck by championing the Google upstart. Winner: Microsoft.

6. Backup. Many companies do not back up their data. GAPE has backup baked in. Winner: Google.

7. Corporate data security. Google’s acquisition of Postini added an information security component, but similar solutions are widely available. Winner: Tie.

8. Offline functionality. Those who want to take a shot at GAPE have had one big meaty target: it doesn’t work without an Internet connection. However, Google is responding with Gears, a software widget that caches work to the hard drive when required and synchs online when the ’net becomes available. “All the applications in Google Apps will become offline enabled over the next year,” Girouard promised. Winner: Microsoft, but only for now.

So, is GAPE right for your company? Not if a little risk is a bad thing or if your employees are truly power users. Everyone else should at least establish a GAPE trial group. At time of writing, GAPE was free for one month. Check out www.google.com/a.


Peter Wolchak
Editor
pwolchak@backbonemag.com