Google Apps Counters Microsoft Office 2010 Launch
For months now, we’ve been watching the back-and-forth as Google and Microsoft ramp up their respective Apps and Office productivity suites. Now, the drama intensifies. As Microsoft launches Office 2010 today, Google posted a blog entry that says that if users really want to upgrade, they’d complement their existing Office deployment with Google Docs. Here’s the scoop.
Google’s blog entry opens with some fighting words for their rivals in Redmond:
“If you choose this path, upgrade means what it’s supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity. This is a refreshing alternative to the expensive and laborious upgrades to which IT professionals have become accustomed.”
What Google is not-so-obliquely referring to is the $499 price tag on the boxed version of Microsoft Office Professional 2010 ($349 for a download), which some critics say is far too high to be reasonable. For comparison, an enterprise Google Apps license, which includes their SaaS document, presentation, spreadsheet and drawing applications, is $50/user/year and requires no servers and no additional infrastructure investment.
But is it really fair to compare a full-blown Microsoft Office Suite vs. Google Apps? No doubt, plenty of Global 2000 companies and even small businesses depend on Excel for intense, in-house financial applications. And many users we know simply aren’t willing to give up their desktop suites.
So how do the Microsoft and Google options stack up otherwise? One of Google’s major advantages over Microsoft in this arena has been their real-time collaboration functionality, but enterprises that license Office 2010 also receive the right to host Office Web — Microsoft’s stab at SaaS document creation and editing.
The caveat on Microsoft’s side is that on the web, Excel is the only Office application that allows for that kind of real-time collaboration. Word and PowerPoint will support it on the desktop, but in all three cases, SharePoint 2010 is required — and even then, the functionality looks to be fairly limited compared to Google Apps.
In response, Google’s blog points out that thanks to their DocVerse acquisition, users will soon be able to collaborate from within Office 2003/2007 as easily as from the Apps interface, and they’ll have all the cloud goodness besides, with no compromises on functionality.
So here’s the bottom line: Google makes a strong argument here for using Docs in addition to Microsoft Office and leaving the Office 2010 version by the wayside. But Office remains the de facto standard in the workplace, and I suspect a lot of VARs have had this upgrade planned since it was announced.
I’ll put the question to the audience, then: Does Google Apps have what it takes to compete with Microsoft Office 2010? Or has Microsoft already won?
Additional insights by Joe Panettieri. Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.
Microsoft won fifteen years ago with MS Office 95 (and a U.S. government buy-in to that). MS also won the browser wars over ten years ago, and we have seen that a good alternative with unique features could bring the fight back to Microsoft’s turf.
I suspect that Google Apps will continue to improve and hack away at the MS Office market share, though not decimate it.
Daeng Bo: The VAR Guy’s key question… Can Microsoft “grow” or “expand” the Office business (i.e., revenue) at this point?
I would say that the market has saturated, but every time I say that about something, I’m proven wrong.
MS stock price has been flat for a decade. I think that says definitively that the market isn’t going to grow (in dollar terms) much beyond this level. MS is including a SaaS model, meaning that the number of users may grow, but I think revenue will remain fairly stable. Getting it to grow will be a miracle
Too many established businesses and professionals are tied to MS Office and retooling is too expensive for MS to lose a lot of share and revenue.
I’m using Google Apps lately because I strongly believe in the cloud concept and endpoint independence. And I’m really disappointed. The Google Apps are horrible. I understand that a webapp lacks features found in a desktop product, but Google Apps are unworkable. Even Wordpad is far more useable than GA’s word-processor. No joke.. Gmail as a business email platform? Trust me in 2000 OWA worked better. The stuff with ‘labels’ instead of normal folders to store email… And all the hassle to add a person or group to your contact list..
And most of the time I was not able to import/convert MS Office documents. And since this is a MS Office world you’re more or less isolated.
I really tried to like Google Apps but its just too painful right now. To much of a sacrifice. Google really needs to get to work if they want to succeed in providing a good alternative to Office. Especially compared to Office 2010 and all the Office Live/Online developments. Please give M$ a little competition, the world needs it. Nevertheless suddenly Office does not seem so expensive anymore..
[email protected]: Stocks only rise when earnings per share continually rise, so The VAR Guy thinks you’ve made some valid points.
[email protected]: The VAR Guy has had good success with Google Apps, but he sees it as an additional option and continues running Microsoft Office, much in the way that homes still have conventional ovens next to Microwave ovens…
-TVG