Gates to Google: 'Your business applications stink'
Bill Gates may misunderstand open source, but he's fairly accurate in his portrayal of Google's attempts to get into the enterprise. Whatever one wants to say about the quality of Microsoft's software, one can't dispute its reach. Google, on the other hand, has been king in consumer search...and that's about it.
It's a big "it" but it tends to mask Google's continual failures in just about everything else (Used many of these lately?), including enterprise applications, as Gates points out:
In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don't understand the special needs of business. Today, their economic model is based on consumer search. They have done an incredible job there and obviously we're investing in challenging them in that space ...
If you've seen ... the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things, they really don't have the richness the responsiveness. You can see that relative [to] the success they have had there. Most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day and then after that ....
I really want Google to be successful in the enterprise because Microsoft needs competition. But I just can't see it. Not in the short term, anyway.
Oracle and SAP may give Microsoft a run for its money, but Google has struggled even to get people (outside Silicon Valley) to use its supposedly successful Gmail.
The good news is that Google has lots of money and lots of time to put that money to use. The bad news is that Microsoft needs competition today.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
A lot of the stuff that Google is doing is pioneering, so we can't expect them to get everything right in a matter of months. Hopefully, they'll figure things out, understand what users want and deliver good products accordingly.
Furthermore, many people are still hesitant to use Web-based services that do jobs traditionally based on the desktop. But this too may change. I am a teaching assistant at a major university, and I can assure you that many of my students have moved pretty much everything they could from the desktop to the Web. At university as elsewhere, we are using an increasing amount of online collaboration tools, etc. So I have no doubt that things will change in the future.
BTW, Matt, this is off-topic, but while I'm talking about universities, in case you weren't aware of this, there is a quite open source revolution sweeping through universities and schools around the world. Check out http://sakaiproject.org/
I'm not affiliated with them but my universities is right in the middle of transitioning to Sakai.
Google docs are just fine for basic users, and will surely develop - personally, I much prefer a basic system that's free and accessible everywhere, to a costly, cumbersome and slow one. I'd guess that 95% of people use less than 30% of most M$ programs, but they are lumbered with the whole kit and caboodle, with its needless and frustrating complexity
Bill certainly has a point, and Google have got work to do - but with online apps, where's M$? Still trying to find a way to sell it, that's where.
I don't think Google sees itself as competing with M$ in the traditional way at all; its products will develop at their own rate, for their own markets.
Meanwhile, M$ will find *its* market shrinking slowly, as expectations change, and companies realise that M$ stuff is often a very poor investment.
I agree with Gates on Writely and the Spreadsheets - but people sneered at PCs until they got "good enough" on a vastly different business model compared to what preceded them. I think the same will happen to fat client apps in time as well.
Ian W.
Hey Pot... this is the Kettle... YOUR BLACK!
For a company already with a IT infrastructure: Most cloud applications really suck. But for startups and small businesses with low costs, they make good sense: they can save these companies serious cash in the long run, and better yet do it on free platforms like Linux.
Picasa, Google Earth, Google Maps, Blogger and SketchUp are some of the most useful products out there, for free.
If you're talking 'enterprise' solutions, go and take a walk into any creative company's office and see just how many of Google's products are sitting on their computers.
Matt is way too harsh on Google.
After years of supporting hundreds of Excel and Word users it is my opinion that Google Docs are very close to being "good enough" for the vast majority of business users. They can already fulfill the needs of most home users.
And based on Microsoft's reaction to every Google advance, it would appear they share my opinion.
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by jstanton22
March 5, 2008 4:34 AM PST
- Watch the video of Bill's thoughts on Google Apps:
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(9 Comments)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxrVni27Jy8