Microsoft: Here's why Google Apps suck | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft: Here's why Google Apps suck

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19 pointsshrikant15 comments

Nice to know that Microsoft can rely on Google to host it's advertisements.

More like, pay for the distribution. That's a pretty sweet deal for anyone.

The "Why Microsoft: Exchange vs. Gmail" video would be better titled "Why Microsoft: Exchange vs Exchange on Gmail", since half of the issues are with Google's Exchange integration.

Or more specifically - According to Microsoft, the problem with Gmail seems to be that it doesn't integrate with Microsoft Exchange. Which isn't surprising, since it's a closed, proprietary platform.

Rather twisted to sell vendor lock-in as a feature, isn't it?

Isn't the whole point of vendor lock-in to establish it and then sell based on it?

This seems like a very silly ad campaign by Microsoft. As a company who is in, by far the dominant position in terms of productivity suites, I can't see any reason why you'd start comparing other products such as Google Docs and OO.o with yours - it makes them look like they _are_ comparable, except that some of them are free.

OO.o Calc sort-of compares with Excel 2003, i.e. it's not quite as good but given the price (free) and the level at which most people make and use spreadsheets, it's Good Enough.

However, it seems pretty clear from the Excel / Calc comparison video that Excel has moved far ahead in power (watching it, I noticed that they seem to have fixed a lot of the pain points I currently have with Excel '03) whereas Calc is still stalled.

Disclosure: I use XP/Office 2003 at work and Ubuntu / OO.o at home.

The Google Docs vs Excel is pretty scathing: the user can't open the document from GMail, and even simple stuff like charts are removed from the spreadsheet.

Google do search and maps really well, but Google apps. including GMail, still aren't very popular (Yahoo mail is apparently huge). They're an engineering company, they still don't get user experience. There's still no preview window in gmail, documents are shown with very long lines of text that are difficult to read when compared with the common newspaper-column layout. Google need to start hiring UI people yesterday if they want to compete with MS in the office space.

I've asked this in previous threads about mail applications, but what is an email preview window/pane for? How is it any different from actually opening the email? GMail (and apps) definitely has room for improvement, but lack of preview is such an oft cited "problem" yet I don't even understand the complaint. (I use GMail for all my email)

Simple:

(time taken to close window ) x (amount of messages per day)

Compare 'Alt-F4, up arrow' with 'up arrow'.

Making the text width narrower also increases your reading speed, around 6-12 words per column is apparently the ideal width and is the basis for all newspapers, and since suck.com started it in the late 90s, the majority of websites.

Thanks for the explanation!

I'd also like to take the time to point out that you can get similar functionality using the vim-style keyboard hotkeys in gmail: j/k to move to the next/previous conversation.

No prob. Keyboard shortcuts are useful when they work (j and k don't in Chrome 5 on my laptop, OS X 10.6), but a lot of users use the preview bar to skip messages too.

Sadly enough, that little bit in the video about corporate people spending all day in their Outlook is way too close to truth...

Looks like the guys at MS decided to take a lesson or two from Xobni.

what does it have to do with google apps? they mentioned nothing about google, nor was anything obviously inferred.

Look at the videos on the right, they compare Microsoft's products to Google's.

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