For its entire 30-year history, Microsoft has delivered
software to users in some physical form, be it a
floppy disc, CD-ROM, or DVD. But many customers
today are expecting software to be online as well. No company
excels at this quite like Google, which provides a host of
Web-based applications and services that increasingly compete
with Microsoft products and services. Indeed, Google is
a company that you should examine in relation to your own
needs. Here’s what you need to know about Google.
How Google Competes
In addition to its dominant search engine, Google has
branched out into a startling array of Web-based products,
services, servers, and client applications such as Gmail,
Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Blogger,
Picasa, and YouTube. What’s particularly amazing is that
while Google is somewhat dismissive of Microsoft—Google
CEO Eric Schmidt once remarked that the software goliath
was “not a significant competitor” online—Microsoft
recently categorized Google and other “cloud computing”
companies as primary competitors.
So where’s the overlap? For the largest enterprise customers,
Google is just a distant promise, and the company
doesn’t offer any of the core infrastructure servers that
Microsoft does. For everyone else, however, from individuals
to small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs), Google has
some compelling solutions.
The most obvious of these is Google Apps (www.google.com/a), a powerful suite of online tools that provide Web-based
email, calendaring, IM, Web hosting, and document
creation and collaboration (word processing and spreadsheets
currently, and databases soon). Individuals and
families can use Google’s Gmail.com domain or their own
domain for free. SMBs and educational institutions can
move up to more expansive versions of the service, usually
at a very low cost.
The advantages over Microsoft solutions such as
Exchange are numerous: Google Apps is hosted and managed
by Google, so customers don’t need to hire, train,
and manage technical staff for services such as email and
calendaring. The applications are often less complex than
Microsoft’s solutions, and since the emerging workforce
of recent college graduates is already familiar with Google
and Gmail, most don’t require much help getting up and
running. Google Apps is generally less expensive than
Exchange as well, especially for small businesses.
Google has been working to ensure that Google Apps
scales to the needs of bigger companies as well, but those
needs include such things as security, uptime and performance.
It’s likely that Google Apps will meet these needs
within the next few years, regardless of the size of your
organization. Currently, however, the suite doesn’t offer
the functionality or uptime guarantees most businesses
require.
Looking Ahead
One of the most obvious complaints about Web services
is that users must be online to take advantage of them.
However, two emerging trends make this less of a concern.
First, an increasingly large number of users can access Web
services from their smart phones, and it’s becoming less
financially prohibitive for even small businesses to outfit
their workforce with such devices. With a smart phone,
users are rarely offline, and upcoming changes in rules for
air travel will likely eliminate that final hurdle as well.
Second, Google says that it’s found a solution for offline
Web applications and services. Dubbed Google Gears
(gears.google.com), this technology will let users access
Google Web services while offline. To date, only one Google
service, Google Reader, takes advantage of this technology.
Google says that it will bring other services online with
Google Gears in the months ahead.
In the meantime, Google is trying to meet customers’
offline needs in other ways. As a result of a recent partnership
with Sun Microsystems, Google now offers Sun’s
$70 StarOffice 8 office productivity suite—a competitor to
Microsoft Office—for free through the Google Pack service.
StarOffice is more like Office 2000 than Office 2007, but it
does offer the word processing, spreadsheet, presentation,
and database functionality that most customers require,
and the price is certainly right. When used in conjunction
with StarOffice, Google Apps gives SMBs much of the
functionality of Exchange and Microsoft Office—albeit with
some incompatibilities—for free or, at worst, for a fraction
of the cost of the Microsoft products.
Recommendation
Although Google Apps isn’t adequate for most large companies,
SMBs should begin to evaluate Google Apps and
how it compares with Microsoft technology. Educational
institutions especially are an excellent fit for Google’s
services—though to be fair, Microsoft offers similar if less
mature academic packages for its Windows Live Hotmail
service.