From Microsoft comes this highly snarky video, trying to convince businesses that a search company "moonlighting" a purveyor of productivity software is a bad choice for them. A few thoughts.
1. Microsoft is hardly a disinterested observer here. Microsoft Office (et al.) is their biggest cash cow, and Google Apps is a direct and ongoing challenge to that. If it weren't, MS wouldn't be producing this sort of fluff.
2. For all MS's FUDding about security and the cloud and all — they have their own cloud Office suite (and one which is multiple generations behind Google's).
3. Google has been running Apps for quite some time. This is not beta software. What is new(ish) is Google marketing directly to businesses with it.
4. Offlline access is an important point, but not necessarily a deal-breaker, depending on your business and where it works. Some companies are persistently online with their locations and personnel; for others, it's more of a challenge.
5. Google is not, in my experience, a responsive company to what clients ask for. They have their vision, their roadmap, and they move forward with it. Microsoft doesn't create customized versions of their apps, either — but a lot more deployment flexibility is built-in, and there's large ecosystem of third parties willing to help with further features and so forth.
6. Google's offerings aren't cheap. Neither are Microsoft's. I think Google per user is less expensive, but not as much as you might think.
7. Google Apps are not as powerful as Office's analogous apps. The question is, how many of those features are actually needed by most users. Some organizations, for example, may be heavy pivot table users; others may well not be.
8. Google Apps online, active collaboration abilities surpass anything Microsoft offers.
So there are some reasonable strengths that Microsoft can bring to this particular discussion, and weaknesses or shortcomings on the Google side that they can point out. Unfortunately, this ad just comes off more as snark than anything else, a typical Microsoft FUD attempt, which doesn't help anyone. #ddtb
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I've not used Office 365 myself, but an evaluation I heard about over the last year indicated it was not yet ready for Prime Time. Once it is, I'm sure about 90% of the arguments MS makes in this ad will suddenly not be talked about any more.
I'll note that Google Docs does allow paragraph indentation and stuff like that, so I suspect there's a large number of people somewhere between "spacebar alignment" and "pivot table wizards" who would find it does what they need it to do. 🙂
Is that any worse than “an operating system company ‘moonlighting’ as a purveyor of productivity software,” to use your words? Each company has branched out into the field. Microsoft did it first, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was not originally their core competency (if i am employing the proper buzzword). Seems a bit hypocritical to me.
Oh, Chrome isn’t showing this video, either. Is it just me?
@Avo – Weird. Okay, fixed that, too.
I've been a Microsoft Office power user for a long time now and often use many of the features not in Google apps. However it always amazes me the number colleagues and students coming into post-secondary who will still use "spaces" to align text! So as you point out, most people simply don't take advantage of the power of MS Office which makes the Google Alternative a very viable competitor.
In addition, we use the simultaneous editing functionality of Google Apps all the time in our department and it kills me that Microsoft have never provided this functionality. I haven't checked into Office 365, but do you know if their online apps allow for live simultaneous editing for at least three people?
MS are in no danger of losing money, but they've sure taken a back seat on the consumer end of things.
Quite true. Folks are used to using MS Office at work, but the home market has a lot less saturation,