Everyone is talking about Google’s attempt to go head to head with Microsoft over the office productivity suite, and I just don’t buy it.
There are three main reasons why I don’t think this will happen:
1- Large companies, which are the real money makers for Microsoft Office, are not going to make a switch. There is way to much invested from their perspective on the software and training to start experimenting with a new alternative, especially an advertising based product.
2- Google’s product sucks. I hate to say it, but if you have tried their different office offerings, you would know that they just don’t work well. Not yet at least. I think we need 3-5 times the broadband speed for a applications to really be on-demand…up until then, they are just too limited.
3- Google is terrible at launching new products. Other than search and maybe Gmail, what have they done lately?
What this means is that for at least the next 3 years Google won’t even make a dent in Microsoft’s market share. By that point Microsoft will have the time to roll-out the next version of its product and fine-tune all of the collaboration tools they are working on. If they really feel threatened by Google, then they have Live.com to release a striped down on-demand version for the home and small office, with which to compete with Google.
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August 30th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
I understand your point here. At least the third one.
Googe base, froogle, some bookdownload etc.
I am a net savvy and I never managed to try these out. They just launch new products and hope to live on the word of mouth and blog comments.
No hatin on google though. Love their seach engine and the adsens/adwords programme