I just finished reading Mike Elgan's article in Datamation on the new Google Office moves. The Goog has been busier than just about anyone this past month, managing to aggravate people from Beijing all the way West to Cupertino in a relatively short time.
First, a rollout of some new mostly-integrated and improved apps (Mail/Buzz/Reader/Wave) with an audacious plan to provision every user on Day One with "friends" (no way was that an oversight.) Later by increasing the drama by "un-friending" Steve and the Apple folk. Today Tom Foremski wrote in his blog that The Goog is pushing 10%+ of all internet traffic on it's own private network. And today we see representatives in Congress talking up the devious and generally mean Chinese government and what is the US gonna do about that anyway? And now the moves are being put on the venerable office suites from Microsoft, IBM and Sun.
I don't think they'll win every battle The Goog has begun this month. Although it does get points for trying. The desktop may be only partly won, for two reasons.
First, The Goog's products lack functionality in a couple of key areas important to the corporate sector:
- Task management is something that Microsoft alone has working well. It plays with other tools including Access, Project and SharePoint. A space where IBM does will with Lotus/Domino, but OpenOffice has nothing. None of this is a surprise, given the audiences underwriting these three: Microsoft and IBM were principally focused on large corporate accounts who could afford to invest in functionality to maximize the usefulness of their business people. Sun sponsors OpenOffice, an Open Source product for good will to the many folks who need to get their charts, memos and spreadsheets formatted and printed while keeping the price to a minimum.
- Database management for the desktop may be seen as a luxury for many, but while I've worked in business the dBases/R:bases Paradoxes and Accesses have been essential for driving out financial information on both scheduled and ad-hoc bases. IBM integrates this functionality; OpenOffice, not so well. One could say, OpenOffice not at all.
Second, no matter how sophisticated the Google applications get, they're not getting into the corporate glass houses without establishing service-level agreements for application support. Something The Goog could do with almost no effort.
I don't think they will, because IMHO this move is not not about the corporate market. It's the small to mid-size businesses, and SOHOs. There are a lot of offices that grudgingly deal with vendors for combined telephone/internet/server support, and this would be a significant source of budget relief for folks whose sales are down.
And there's the free crowd. The folks who have a computer for streaming video and music and hitting up Facebook to see what the in-laws are doing. These folks like free. They have other stuff they have to pay for, like groceries, bandwidth, and cell phone contracts. The whole proposition of Facebook relies on this - what better natural choice for this target audience than a set of document tools that are available everywhere, are cobbled together reasonably well and cost nothing?
The "free crowd" and the smaller businesses are natural fits for these tools. But the tools aren't what Corporate IT needs to support large business.
Google's come out with a new format called Living Story, which proposes to change the way news is received and digested. It's kind of a cool idea which permits newsers to produce a destination rather than a story for chosen topics. Think, 