Google Sites: What's all the fuss?

The launch of Google Sites is like the opening of a movie or play. The critics (including myself) feast on it, churning out copy and opinions as to whether Google Sites is a Microsoft SharePoint killer or merely the McDonald's of wikis, with more nutritional value than the venerable fast food burger and no cost.

Dennis Howlett wasn't impressed. On his ZDNet blog he wrote:

After 16 months at Google developer's hands, the outcome is substandard. This is such a pity. In its JotSpot incarnation, it was far from perfect but that didn't matter because JotSpot was shedding light on a new way of collaborating. Since passing into Google's hands, the guts have been ripped out and then re-assembled with as much Google 'stuff' as they could cram in but rushed to completion.

At the very least, Google should get rid of the gadgets addition facility and rework it. Otherwise, I sense the SMBs at which it is aimed will find the service a turn off.

I'm don't think the guts were ripped out, but JotSpot was given the Google makeover, which is rooted in the way founders Brin and Page think about Web applications. Like Google search, the interface is extremely simple. No boiling the ocean with features no one can comprehend. Dennis pointed to slowness in integrating Google gadgets in Sites and a lack of business-oriented widgets. Maybe Google should have added "beta" to the Sites label. Gmail is still in beta after several years of gestation.

Zoli Erdos sums it up well:

Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release.

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[rernst2]

Not sure you would want to go with Google. The debacle with its recent tagging of false positives with its search engine (causing great grief to institutions and universities) shows how vulnerable reliance on an online solution can be.

Observing this small nightmare I have come to the conclusion that with all whiz bang Adobe and Microsoft and Google are delivering, the weakest link in the chain is some programming error on these companies' behalf which will shut down your business until Google and others decide in their wisdom to correct it.

If your business (or charity) depends on it - think twice before putting it into the hands of a free service.

[PBwikiChris]

Take this all with a grain of salt, because it's hard for me to be completely objective, but....

This is one of the reasons PBwiki offers both free and paid services. Some people aren't concerned with polish and support, and for those people, a free service is perfectly appropriate.

On the other hand, PBwiki has thousands of paying customers, including Facebook, Symantec, DePaul University, and the FDA. They're willing to pay for support, reliability, and functionality.

[JasonMichael33]

Just because its free, doesn't mean it has to suck. I'm sure it wasn't free for Google to develop it.... why did they waste money on bad design and programming? Couldn't they send these folks back to school or something? Now they have a bunch of bad reviews, when if they had just taken another 6 mos or a year, getting together new talent or improving the talent of those who work for them, they would have heard "Wow!" and "Whoooo hooo!" from their captive audience. Instead its just pages and pages of disappointment, across the web... bad management.... I'm a developer, and I know how these things go, but its for a much smaller company. I don't think Microsoft or IBM would put out a substandard web application. I wouldn't either, and I'm just one person!

[TimRommes]

I have to agree with JasonMichael33 about Microsoft. They would never put out a substandard web application. Other kinds of applications, however. The paying public was the test bed for every application they put out for decades. Every one of them substandard. I assume that as a developer Jason has been privvy to the "don't buy it until SP2" philosophy. This is the new "good business" way of getting things done. You release a piece of crap into the real world and find out what the real, instead of laboratory, issues are, then spend your resources fixing the most important issues first. Microsoft was ahead of the pack on this way of thinking. It saves a lot of development cost, as even after an app is laboratory approved there are always still real world issues. The problem that people run into is that they themselves have no self-restraint and rely on unproven technology to handle their critical information. Wait for SP2 is a policy written in blood and only the foolish depend on a new app.

[arkizzle]

"" I don't think Microsoft or IBM would put out a substandard web application. ""

Hotmail has been below par for some years now, even without the Gmail comparison. Either they step up or get considered sub-standard..

[colamix]

How can people possibly find something to complain about this news? I mean, at one end of the opposing poles we have a convicted predatory monopoly and at the other Google who churns out yet another free service minus the evil. I hope Google keeps on this path to exterminate Microsoft and succeeds without even trying to :)

[podstorage]

Do no evil - Not until the stock drops from $741 to $509 and the decision is made to charge advertisers for unwanted Key Words. All is not well at Google - just don't expect anyone who dislikes the dark side to talk about it.

[rapier1]

minus the evil... I'm not sure I would accept that as true. Minus the MS evil sure - but that doesn't make it evil free. Google is, with some success, convincing all of us to hand over every piece of data we have to them. From our work to our email to our credit cards. Now, being a data store isn't Google's business. Search isn't Google's business. Neither is creating web applications, phone interfaces, or any of those techno happy things. Google's business is selling highly focused and ubiquitous advertising. The technology is just a means to that end.

[dag_gano]

Funny how when the "predatory monopoly" gave it's web browser away for free it was "evil", but when Google gives something away for free it's "not evil". If you want to see something "evil", you should see my AdWords bill.

[shahsh]

Google Sites can't be compared to SharePoint. If Google was intending it to be simillar - it aint. SharePoint is a workhorse in its ability to create lists and integrate knowledge from many to help you do what you want. SharePoint helps those with no progamming knowledge/systems administration/database mgmt create lists that link to one another and can come from many sources.

[Josh Viney]

Sharepoint is overpriced for most small/medium business and can be extremely difficult to manage. In many cases companies end up hiring Sharepoint developers to manage it and add features that no one really needs anyway.

I don't mean to say that it's bad software. In the right hands it can be useful. My point is more that it's a product of years of feature requests made by complex organizations, and built by Microsoft. When purchased it brings that entire legacy with it. I personally prefer simple inexpensive solutions to communication problems, and Google does a pretty good job of providing simple and inexpensive.

Oh yeah, your organization doesn't need to go through a six month RFP process if the application is FREE.

[BIGELLOW]

SharePoint is a terrible piece of over-priced junk.

[NikEst]

I'm a developer, but I can't do web pages. This is a nice, simple, wiki solution that can put up an easy to navigate site. Sure, I wouldn't put mission critical stuff on it, but don't ding google for reliability. That they have. Yes, it could've used 6-12 months more in the chute before being offered to the public, but it's a good start.

[edanuff]

Frankly, I'm confused about all the comparisons to SharePoint, the two are nothing alike.

[arkizzle]

From the banner headline on the homepage of google sites (sites.google.com):

"" One-stop sharing for team information ""

[Danathar]

Uh.....Beta IS attached to it (when I looked)

[cuzisurf]

another developer here but also director of IT ops for a SMB. after switching to googleapps strictly for the slick web interface (because cost of running an internal exchange server was not in the cards), i was putting off deploying sharepoint because the costs of servers, CALs, and software is prohibitively expensive compared to "free" googleapps. i am extremely happy to see this as a simple portal for collaborating on documents etc. we don't use google docs b/c we "need" Office for deliverables to clients, but this first cut at Sites will do the trick quite nicely. as with any new product, there is a much larger test pool upon deployment and thus the kinks get worked out much faster in the long run. however, i agree that tagging a "Beta" on it may have been a good idea.

[dahowlett]

Sorry @cuzisurf but the world is NOT made up of developers - it's made up of end users. The gadgets thing I slayed is appalling. Check it for yourself and then tell me it will 'do the trick nicely.'

[mrcoder]

beta is code for cya

perpetual beta is perpetual cya

[someuser93]

I've helped companies spend months transitioning other intranet/group-ware type systems over to SharePoint, and clients were very happy. But while SharePoint was edging out Lotus Notes, this completely leapfrogs them both. No dedicated hardware, no server maintenance, and the basic wiki/calendar/collaboration features are actually much nicer. And it's only $50, that's pocket change next to SharePoints licensing fees which *start* at $5K (that's not including client licenses, or server hardware either).

[bedney42]

Dan -

Dennis was spot on as far as 'the guts being ripped out'. As someone who has a friend at Google the story behind Google Sites is worse than you can imagine. Buy a company, take a product off the market for 16 months, give the existing JotSpot user community crappy service so that you can... rewrite the entire backend in Java.

Yep. That's what the 16 months were for. God forbid that we leave the current stuff in place while we migrate to Google's Java infrastructure. JotSpot's backend was originally written in another web technology, but that wasn't good enough for the Computer Scientists over at Google, so we have to rewrite it all in Java. Now. Without pause. God forbid that its not in the One True Technology - Java!!!

Then relaunch it with:

- Less features than the original...
- The standard Google "so simplified that its barely usable" user interface...
- A bunch of widgets and other crap that no one wanted...

Sites is just another example of a company that is so stunningly unprepared for what it really takes to do "boring business applications" that its laughable. I wouldn't put any content into this thing to save my soul, especially if you are a business user.

This reminds me of the stories I've been hearing about Google Docs where someone at a company puts company proprietary information into Google Docs and then leaves the company. When other company employees try to get access to the information, they have to call or email support at Google and then pray that someone there can forward username/password information so that this company can get access to its *own data*. No forethought was put into having 'authorized company contacts' or any of that before the service was launched.

Another poster here was right. This is the Google Way. Keep a product endlessly in beta because otherwise you might actually have to do... *customer service* and *support* and all of the things that a business user needs. There's only one thing a business user cares about: running his business. He doesn't care a wit for what backend technology is being used.

Now, if you were a geek at Google, sipping your free Goocino, sitting on your Goochair, eating your free Goofood, driving around your Prius that the company helped pay for and getting your technical jollies off on the next new thing that you're planning to ship the 0.0.0.0.66 version of (and that you never have any plans to finish out to a 1.0 Final either because then you might actually have to *support* it), that business stuff sounds awfully boring, doesn't it?

This is just a variation on the 'open source copout': "I'll give it away for free and then I don't have any obligation to support it because its free and support/customer service is boring and I want to go hack on the next new great thing".

I'm an open source developer and have made years worth of development effort available 'for free', but I don't imagine that that absolves me of responsibility to do a high-quality product and support it the best I can. My name is attached to it.

Yet another in a long list of 'interesting projects' from Google...

[dfarber]

Google does have a $50 per user per year offer with support and some integration features but it is not enterprise class....it's no-IT required class...and not fully baked...but as I said, you can see where it is heading...
DF

[cydenllc]

I tried Google Apps, but ThinkFree was just miles ahead of them and came much, much closer to emulating Microsoft Office products. Google is close on a lot of things, and every time I think I'm going to dump them I find myself right back in there. Usually for Notebook.

[Sanskrit228]

As a free-PBWiki wiki user, I'm not impressed with Google Sies. It's slow, the widgets in many cases are unconfigurable and little more than eye candy. (I do like the one, two-column page option.) As for "I don't think Microsoft or IBM would put out a substandard web application": Can you spell "IE7 user interface"? Perhaps it will get better over time, but for now I'll sit back and watch.

[PBwikiChris]

Thanks for your loyalty, Sanskrit! While Google Sites is a pretty bare-bones product, I do think they successfully Google-ized its appearance, and I think it has some neat features.

Of course the folks here at PBwiki prefer our own product...along with thousands of other paying customers.

[PBwikiChris]

I think Google has a very specific set of objectives in mind. They're trying to stake out some mindshare, and they had something very specific in mind when they compared themselves to SharePoint, and avoided using the word "wiki."

Google is trying to set itself up in opposition to SharePoint (a good idea--SharePoint is widely used, but little loved)... It's low risk (though some of those reviews must have hurt). Google can see if people are willing to flock to its banner. If not, they can bury it just like so many other previous projects.

[dahowlett]

@Dan - mine is essentially an emotional response about a company that consistently fails to deliver business class apps. Having played with JotSpot from the get go, it feels like the guts have been removed. But...I'm wondering whether you're maybe missing my point.

The gadgets thing really is poor. Get rid of that and re-engineer and maybe it could do well - I hope it does for general competitive reasons. But there is no excuse to put out 'stuff' that is substandard. It is exactly the kind of thing that puts end users off.

[spreadsmile]

Microsoft released Office Live Small Business (http://www.officelive.com/) at the Office Developers Conference. Office Live is basically a hosted version of SharePoint and is free.

[dctechguy]

I am glad to see I am not alone in getting fatigued with the endless hype and announcements of unfinished product out of Google. Other than "search" and its advertising, Google has not produced any significant or original finished products. I shudder when I see the announcements that Google is moving into medical data management. I certainly do not want my personal medical information in the hands of albeit creative, but certainly sloppy software developers. And I agree with post about "OfficeLive". The basic service is free and the customer support really does work to solve you problems. Ever tried Google Customer Support? A little maturity in business is not a bad thing.

[RichardThomas]

What might be more interesting is that Google may be secretly involved in a movie called infinite play that blends with reality. Buried in the movie site are terms that specifiy Google employees cannot particpate in the suprizes. The leads and clues can be found using Google which is refered to as the Great Oracle. In fact if you google infinite play the movie the links lead one on a great journey.

[pearlbluevtx]

We are a SMB and 2 out of 4-5 employees have been in the IT world for a few years but not our focus any longer. I can tell you from running/sysadmin multiple servers in data centers and e-mail/web servers etc that Google Apps are a good solution for SMB depending on what that SMB needs are. We need good e-mail, everywhere access, docs is secondary but USED and helpful. We still use Office for our main office needs but Docs let's us share ideas, xls, docs etc and it's easy to do. Gmail is our main use and it has been really wonderful. I have some ex-clients that I moved over to G-Apps and they have been really surprised out how well it has all worked out. I pay for the "Premium" service - don't have too but I do - and I've used their tech support once and it was fine. I'm sure Google isn't perfect ... no companies are. The SITES deal - seems fine to me... we'll probably use it for a few things but it will be because it's easy to get to, use and able to share with our staff. Again, we're small but G-Apps has been one of the best decisions - mainly for e-mail - that I made. ThinkFree / MS / Etc ... even Yahoo - their e-mail solutions aren't good for me and Think doesn't offer it that I see. Look at ThinkFree too - they say "beta" as well.