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Eric Schmidt: No Office Product Here  (View post)

Mambo [PersonRank 10]

Friday, November 10, 2006
17 years ago3,597 views

If it's not competing, what exactly is the point of releasing? Just so Microsoft can come up with a rival solution that people will actually use?

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

What about competing with SharePoint?

Reto Meier [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I think people often forget that Microsoft Office is designed – and targeted – at an Office environment. They're marketing specifically at places with tens of thousands of users (employees).

Google's tools have instead been aimed at home users (though small business can make good use of them too), but families are the real goal. It's people for whom Excel is overkill for writing a todo list, a budget, or planning a holiday. Same with docs. Anyone who thinks these products are directly aimed at the same market as Office combined with Sharepoint are (for now at least) dreaming.

It's a testament to the industry's dislike of Sharepoint / Office that people would even consider Docs & Spreadsheet a threat to them. That said, I've not had to open Office or Excel at home since Docs & Spreadsheets came out, but I doubt the investment bank I contract for are going to switch anytime soon :)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Reto, true as that may be, in my old company I was always hoping they'd replace Outlook with Gmail.

Katinka Hesselink [PersonRank 2]

17 years ago #

Well, MS Office may be used in offices, but it's power comes from it being the only suite that most people use – anywhere. If google can eat away from that on the home-front, they will also (at a later stage) likely eat away at the MS dominance in the office. The main difference is of course that home-users often don't pay for their software, so Microsoft won't feel the pain very deeply.
Right now though the online google-suite is clearly not ready for the office environment. Offices use a lot of features that are way too advanced for writely and whatever google has made of that.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

===>> "Offices use a lot of features that are way too advanced for writely and whatever google has made of that."

yeah, 80% of the features are only used by 20% of the User!! So that means 80% of the users never even know or use that in their lifetime!!

===>> "What about competing with SharePoint ?"

Yes, Sharepoint 2007 rocks, I dont think that Google can get into the collobrative KM pklatform *yet*. Bundle this with vista and there is a strong glue base for the office users.

Google is going for the mass consumer market and this far outweighs the users in an office envoirnment. Goog's core is getting more user to work w/software of the internet. This permits them to dish out ads and this way, you get a lot of direct consumer marketing. With out any marketing GMail has over 1M users and this number is growing..

By 2010, Google will have about 100M users of their various applications. No think of the Ad servicing to such markets ??

Currently XP sales figures estimated to be approx 80M (EU had 35.5M copies sold). The same can be estimated for Vista..!!

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Gmail had more than 8 mil. users only in the US in June 06 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/technology/24yahoo.html?ex=1311393600&en=59f077c9cd98337f&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

Reto Meier [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Philipp: Tell me about it! I despise Outlook with the furry of a thousand suns and can honestly say that if any company I had worked for used GMail rather than Outlook they'd have improved their productivity significantly. Google Web Apps is, I think, attractive to companies with less than 20ppl for email and mundane spreadsheet work / collaborative documents.

But Excel (more than Word) is a real powerhouse in a lot of businesses. Excel formulas, combined with VBA, graphs, and pivot tables effectively makes it a programming language for a lot of companies. The things I've seen make me shudder. I had one boss who upgraded his computer every 6months entirely on the basis of it taking to long to open his 100mb+ excel spreadsheets!

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