Google Apps Moving Onto Microsoft’s Business Turf | Hacker News Reader

Google Apps Moving Onto Microsoft’s Business Turf

nytimes.com

69 pointsPr036 comments

In our recent experience, video in Google Hangouts is great for group calls with offshore devs - much more stable than Skype, and better quality overall.

That's just one aspect, but I can see Google apps posing a serious threat to MSFT.

ever tried Google Spreadsheets vs. MS Excel? it's like drag racing a Yugo vs. a Porsche. the browser is such a shit environment to deal with large data sets.

This times a million.

If it's got more than a few sheets or few hundred rows then you will find out how much of a difference there is.

That ain't much in the scale of things either.

No to mention, Office 365. Which, IMHO is very slick.

Good luck Google. They're gonna need it.

It depends on what you are trying to do. If it's a complex model, Excel wins. If you are trying to get two people on different offices to work on the same spreadsheet, Google crushes Excel.

I am not sure why Office 365 cannot be used by two people on different offices to work on the same spreadsheet.

Office 365 says We are the easiest way to work together.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/free-office365-tria...

I'd love to demo Office 365's simultaneous edit functionality hidden somewhere behind that link to see how it compares to Google Docs, but after clicking through two links and seeing multiple pages that were trying to upsell me via "buy now" or "try for 90 days", I have to enter a whole bunch of identifying information to create a new account, and even choose a new, unique domain name. Want to see how Google docs works, which you don't even need to be signed in to google to view or edit? Then click this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AozKRH1Kuez_dGR...

Not going to happen. Not now or ever. Why?

* trust. People don't trust google with their data after a few major fuckups. The same goes for all cloud providers.

* hard to control information flow.

* absolutely worthless support

* features are not comparable.

* cost aggregated over 5 years is more. People use office licenses forever - literally 10+ years.

* legal and regulatory issues.

* PATRIOT act which at least for us European customers throws the safe harbour scheme out of the window.

* Training and fungibility. People are used to mashing word and excel and those people are easily replaceable.

* Availability. Businesses require better availability than your average internet connection but don't want to pay for a better one.

I can't see any reasons to actually use it other than a short term cheap out and the false pretense of lowering support costs.

Even if you were correct in all your points, the increase in collaboration it facilitates is a big enough win to, at minimum, make Google Apps a worthwhile compliment to MS Office. I'm not sure whether you have direct experience with Google Apps in a large enterprise but your points read as if you don't; I'll withhold my comments until/unless you clarify.

By withholding comments which support your claims and instead baselessly accusing the commenter of a lack of experience, your comment detracts from rather than adds to the discussion.

Which collaboration features are missing? Don't forget to explain alternatives to lync, SharePoint and SkyDrive and the venerable exchange as well...

For ref, I did the full technical evaluation for google apps for two companies 200+ employees and came up with the answer above.

Don't forget: No ability to transfer ownership to other companies. Google docs can only be transferred within a company. Documents can be shared with accounts on other companies, but the ownership stays with the creator. Ie: I can't create a spreadsheet and send it to my downstream vendor, unless I share it -- which means I can see any changes the vendor makes.

As if a plain vanilla SharePoint installation wasn't bad enough, where I work we have documents spread across: SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Gmail for Business, Google Drive, Google Apps, shared directories and more.

Same here. We also have clients who have started to use dropbox for file sharing with us. This is giving the legal department heartburn...

Because of files exposed to outside parties?

How is this any different than people emailing files around (which legal departments still do themselves quite a bit)?

But Outlook lets you mark an email as "do not forward". That makes it safe, right?

Yes if you have the relevant group policy rules and filters in exchange.

Documents in many places complicates things. For example, if you have to go through discovery, all of a sudden you have to make sure you find things on every single service you've stored them. That's (part of) legal's job, and the number of different services you're using is a multiplier on a lot of things.

What gp described just seems inefficient in general.

Exactly, and documents emailed around exist in many different places, in many different mail boxes and on many different machines.

Although corporate emails all typically exist on an exchange server. Better in email than 100 different Dropbox accounts.

I won't question the (proper) assumption that enterprises typically use Exchange, but I will say that this is why solutions like Dropbox exist and are adopted in enterprises: because it's easier to get the information where it needs to be than what "enterprise" solutions offer.

It's more that the greater number of channels the more difficult it is to harmonize corporate policies across all those channels. For example, communicating via email entails data retention for a period of time as a matter of law these days (SOX, etc.) What happens when people start using a shared dropbox instance to send, say, todo lists, short messages, power point slides, tech specs, etc. to each other? What's the intersection with the types of communication which are sufficiently "email like" to trigger a concern in terms of data retention? And then that brings up a whole host of technical issues and so forth.

I'm wondering how many HN readers are looking at this comment and are thinking to themselves "That's a great problem for a startup to tackle".

Not such a great problem. If the services you were trying to manage are natural forces, then it makes sense to try and conquer them. However, these services will all actively try to stop your startup from succeeding by pulling legal tricks and other methods to block your access to customer's accounts.

I don't recommend you try this unless you are a lawyer already who can somehow turn this startup into a legal battle, and make profit that way. Good luck...

http://xkcd.com/927/

Sharepoint is a steaming pile of crap and yet somehow it manages to pull in an ungodly amount of revenue. The big problem in that space isn't featureset, it's sales. People buy and use sharepoint because it's backed by MS. In order to beat out MS in that market you don't just need to be incrementally better you either need a product which is so vastly better it leaves sharepoint in the dust or you need something that has killer features which drive adoption and maybe obsoletes sharepoint as a side effect.

Agreed but to be honest there is nothing else that has that good integration that you can shoehorn your entire business process into.

As for startups taking this on, there isn't a chance in hell. The problem is too big to solve quickly enough to get market traction. SharePoint is big and complicated for a real reason.

> In order to beat out MS in that market you don't just need to be incrementally better you either need a product which is so vastly better it leaves sharepoint in the dust

Actually, all you need is a better salesperson. Sharepoint is sold by salespeople to people who have no idea of what they are buying.

It is currently being tackled in various industries by specialized document platforms. Specialized because taking vanilla Sharepoint or Documentum and making it compliant with very specific rules and regulations is a costly nightmare.

We are tackling Life Sciences as we speak.

Great with competition, regardless what you think of them. I hope this means we'll see a Google where users don't have to use Hacker News to get customer support.

It seems weird that Microsoft still haven't implemented two-factor authentication for Outlook.com. Maybe Yahoo will beat them to it.

Support is the other issue. Google's support is - well frankly, crap. Even paying customers (which my firm is) - all we get is email support. If we find a number to call, we've never reached a live person.

I'm sorry, but if my spreadsheet has an issues I can't wait 3 days for email support. I need someone on the phone now.

Support is Google's biggest weakness. From Google Apps to phones. It's something they need to admit they need. And address it.

Microsoft's support is really great. Although it is expensive. Besides phone support you can also get Microsoft's support person sitting next to you to help you out.

Google's business models are at-ends with one another. Are they an ad company? Are they a free/low-end provider who can get away with killing popular services when they no longer benefit them? Are they a serious provider of business services?

They can get away with one, maybe two of these. I'd be happy to pay a bunch more for Google apps if they had a more serious SLA/they gave more confidence that the services aren't going to change, and if they offered business features to match the price.

Perhaps they're just something akin to a umbrella corporation. That leaves their different divisions room to pursue different goals.

Google needs to charge what ever price needed to get Google Apps making money. Trying to be "the free & cheap" alternative then later drastically raising the price or killing services is unacceptable with important business software that does not even have feature parity with the competition.

... And Google has been for years. $50 a year per user seems reasonable and surely covers expenses

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