I posted a while ago about me dumping Outlook for Gmail for domains. It’s a decision I haven’t regretted for a second, in fact, I now found Outlook really clunky to use and makes me feel “claustrophobic” for want of a better word as it’s restricted to one computer. Yes, there’s OWA and hosted exchange solutions, but they are more expensive and still not as good in my opinion.
Now, Google have launched Google Apps Premier Edition. It’s a hosted version of Google’s word processor and spreadsheet for business, $50/user/year. If Microsoft isn’t very worried then they aren’t paying attention.
The most common response I’ll get to this is “bah! They don’t have a quarter of the functionality of Word/Excel”. And no, they don’t. A book was written a few years ago called “The Innovators Dilemma”. It talked about the upstart of new technologies. An example given was steam ships. In the early days, they were slow, unreliable and generally not great. The sail ship people laughed. “Bah! They will never replace our ships”. And initially they didn’t. What they did do is find a niche, as paddle steamers on rivers. That gave them time to slowly but surely improve, and if you don’t know how the story ends take a drive down to your nearest port. There are dozens and dozens of cases like this. Google Apps in my mind is a text book example. It’s not as good, but it has some unique features - the collaboration abilities leave Microsoft Office for dead. For that niche for who collaboration is most important than features, they’ll run to it. And, over time, features will be added. There’s a good chance it will never be as good as Office. One day though, people will look at it and say “hey, that’s good enough for me”. Then, goodbye to Microsoft’s biggest cash cow, Office (last I heard, Office makes more money than Windows).
It’s not too late for them, but if Microsoft’s history is any sign, they’ll do a half baked “me too” offering too late and not pay enough attention to it.
Sorry, Microsoft, you had a good run.