Google is eating Microsoft’s lunch, one tasty bite at a time
blog.rescuetime.com
blog.rescuetime.com
1) Their sample data is based on your product usage and people who use rescue time are probably heavy cloud users. So population set is unfairly waited toward the cloud.
2) Microsoft's get's the majority of their users and revenue from enterprise level sales. Google customer on the other hand is primarily the consumer and small business. This is important because in most enterprise level environments users can't install an application like rescue time.
3) Lastly people double dip - at work use outlook for work and gmail for personal.
It would interesting to just look at productivity apps like word processing or presentation with referrer values from .com addresses only (not logins) . The trending might be very different.
And goverments and public institutions around the world
rescuetime can only provide this level of insight for people that use their software, and that will incur a bias, thats fairly obvious and should go without saying, or at least repeating constantly.
Cheers guys for some really interesting blog posts, some of us appreciate them.
However I disagree that they can go without mentioning the sample bias, especially in this case of corporate vs cloud apps. Yes to HN readers (a lot of whom are working on cloud startups) it's obvious. However to the wider community of people who might be reading that blog, that is not necessarily obvious.
However I think it is slightly misleading to include "Gmail" under the umbrella of "Google Apps" when comparing them to Microsoft Office. It would be fairer to only include the individual Google Docs apps compared to what is included in Microsoft Office.
Many Microsoft Office users might be using Gmail for personal mail simultaneously while not using any other Google Docs products.
However most users of Google Docs are likely not also using Outlook (in isolation of the other Office apps) for their email.
I would trust this data if it came from an anti-virus vendor, Skype, or any other application with a huge and diverse installation base.
So yes, sure, there is a segment in the market that Google is winning.
As we went from the early adopter crowd to the broader population, you would expect to see MS Office trending up as a whole.
To be fair you should include Hotmail. Or you should remove Gmail/GCalendar and Outlook from the list.
My instinct is that webmail, mostly in the hands of Hotmail and Yahoo! mail, has long eclipsed local email programs (like Outlook) in the minds of most users in the world. Gmail was a late comer to this game, and doesn't have nearly the users they do; when you think about 500 or 600 million people the world over using Hotmail and Yahoo! mail, it's hard to believe that local email programs even come close.
Edit: sorry, rereading, now I realize maybe you mean Microsoft has far more users than Gmail. Which is absolutely true - there are around three times as many people using Hotmail as there are using Gmail.
As for Outlook, CampaignMonitor's data shows that Outlook edges out webmail by quite a lot [http://www.campaignmonitor.com/stats/email-clients/]. Not sure how accurate their data is, but it's better than raw speculation.
What bothers me is not the dumb post, but the fact that the author doesn't even try to explain the difference and apparently people behind Rescuetime defend the post here at HN as if it was real research.
No trend can be read out of this data.
"11. Web Office apps. We're interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software. Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it. A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy. And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves. Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're going to beat that."
Relevant? I think so.
Wouldn't that generate a shitstorm of criticism for monitoring users, or do you mean some sort of opt-in protocol?
If Outlook suddenly became twice as efficient, you'd expect to see "Time Spent" decreasing.
That said, I think determining the utility of a product from the amount of time spent in it is a very difficult thing to do. Deriving utility from time spent, and then comparing it between products seems very nebulous at best.
Personally, I'm fine with RescueTime's presentation of the graph here. In the end, eyeballs are eyeballs. I don't know if you could generate a metric (from RescueTime, anyway) that could measure product innovation.
You claim to compare the Office suite to Google Apps, but I don't think GMail and Outlook are included in those categories.
I'd also have expected Word to come higher (it's shown as something like 2-3% of users) given that most professionals probably use it to write a report from time to time.