[AlucardHS]

I seen this story at the bottom of my Bing news feeds. I stopped about half way into this wondering if this "Idea" will have the same fate as Glass.

Link: Google's plan to beat Microsoft Office - Business Insider

[dkediger]

While Google's premise may be true - 80% of the enterprise doesn't need Office - the article only passingly mentions Office365. In my own experience in having managed both, O365 is an order of magnitude more flexible in depth of offerings (and thus pricing), as well as payment options (most GApps resellers require annual licensing commitments, while O365 resellers will pass thru MS monthly billing.

[Legoboyii]

Google is dying a really slow death if they're going to try todo this. MS Office > Google apps in every way imaginable, and anybody from my generation and back knows it too.

It will likely fail like with Google Glass. I fail to see why they keep trying, I really I can't.

[Jas00555]

If Google really thinks that their idea to get businesses to buy and deploy two different productivity suites at once is genius, they're in for a rude awakening.

[palandri]

Open source OpenOffice and LibreOffice been around for a while and they haven't blow Microsoft Office out of the water. I doubt Google will do any better.

[dkediger]

I find the collaboration aspect - from both Google and Microsoft - to be way oversold. A traditional document creator and distribution to consumers who have no need to reflect their own edits back to the original is far,far more prevalent. Most of the created content is sourced from a specific ERP, CRM, etc app anyway, with any needed edits occurring within that 3rd party app.

All of the PCs in my org get LibreOffice, and if complex Excel compatibility/content creation is needed, the user gets an upgraded O365 license.

[xandros9]

We've all seen confidence, whether from MS with its Windows Phone 7 promoting iPhone funeral to this...

[rhapdog]

The real problem here is that most larger corporations, which is what Microsoft really specializes in, do not want to go with it because the support they can get from Microsoft is far superior. They won't go with solutions like LibreOffice for the same reason. Support.

Most corporations are willing to pay extra for that support base. It's not just a matter of using something that's compatible. They want support with it. Why would they use the Google App, then pull out a Office 365 subscription for those few power users that need it? Large corporations don't want to support 2 sets of apps/programs, they want ONE homogeneous solution across all of their user base. Why? Support. It's cheaper to maintain an IT department that way as well.

They think they are going to get business to think more "mobile" by offering this stuff. Stated that in the interview. There is a problem there. The accounting department wants a huge screen for their spreadsheets. I know, I've been there. As a matter of fact, most people want a full size keyboard and full size monitor for doing their data entry tasks. Like my wife on her job as a clinical dietitian, she needs a full PC, not a portable solution. However, going from that full PC to mobile and back again is appealing. That's why Windows 10 is going to blow Google and Apple out of the water.

[Jas00555]

According to Google, this is what "near-perfect rendering" looks like

[xandros9]

http://tapatalk.imageshack.com/v2/15...1b676bd169.jpg

According to Google, this is what "near-perfect rendering" looks like

Perfect, you should never use a 3D pie chart.

(it's misleading)

[fatclue_98]

The plan is not ingenious as the author wrote, it's more like disingenuous. One topic that's near and dear to the Enterprise sector wasn't even mentioned: security. It'll take a lot more than a cheap plan to win over the "men in suits". As Brian Mills would say "good luck".

[sahib lopez]

I thought that comments were funny. "More students are using Google docs" yeah idk what school they are talking about but my college uses msft 365 for their staff and students for compatibility and functionality .
I find it funny at times when a peer in my past classes would work on a power point using Google software only to find out it doesn't fully work with the office suite because it's not compatible .


Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk but I prefer my 810 and 830

[dkediger]

Another potential flaw in their thinking:

They talk about GApps being able to treat an Office install as a first class citizen (Excel will be used rather than Sheets to open an xlsx from Drive), but, can 3rd party apps treat GApps the same?

I can think of, off the top of my head, a half dozen instances in my org where Excel is intertwined to various degrees with a 3rd party app in a deeper sense than just saving a report's data to Excel and opening it for you. I'm not sure, as I haven't tried it, but I doubt GApps supports that now, or in the near future.

Google can chalk that up to the extreme 15%, but in my org half of our user count works this way.

Which leads to another potential flaw - Google needs that extreme 15% to be the same 15% of functionality, or very nearly so, across their user base in order to be able to "ignore" it. Again, using my org, GApps having 85% functional compatibility really becomes 50% as half of my users need functionality inthat extreme 15%. The other half have no need for anything but a compatible viewer for the occasional Excel/Doc/PPT that comes their way. LibreOffice works well enough for that.

And I'm still shaking my head at how the article insisted on comparing GApps to traditional Office and ignored any comparison to O365.

[Nogitsune Micah]

Lol google.
Sent From Micah's Lumia 1520

[Bahamen]

One important point yet to be mentioned: most desk workers already have a certain degree of proficiency with Office, some to the point where muscle memory may even play an important part in their work productivity. I was once assigned to a new PC with OpenOffice instead of MS Office, and thoroughly resented that experience as it required relearning even simple and basic tasks. Most people don't come as a blank slate, they already have some prior experience using MS Office and there are significant costs involved retooling/retraining them to use different software.

[Jas00555]

Another potential flaw in their thinking:

They talk about GApps being able to treat an Office install as a first class citizen (Excel will be used rather than Sheets to open an xlsx from Drive), but, can 3rd party apps treat GApps the same?

I can think of, off the top of my head, a half dozen instances in my org where Excel is intertwined to various degrees with a 3rd party app in a deeper sense than just saving a report's data to Excel and opening it for you. I'm not sure, as I haven't tried it, but I doubt GApps supports that now, or in the near future.

Google can chalk that up to the extreme 15%, but in my org half of our user count works this way.

Which leads to another potential flaw - Google needs that extreme 15% to be the same 15% of functionality, or very nearly so, across their user base in order to be able to "ignore" it. Again, using my org, GApps having 85% functional compatibility really becomes 50% as half of my users need functionality inthat extreme 15%. The other half have no need for anything but a compatible viewer for the occasional Excel/Doc/PPT that comes their way. LibreOffice works well enough for that.

And I'm still shaking my head at how the article insisted on comparing GApps to traditional Office and ignored any comparison to O365.

Actually, that's a very good point. My company isn't "extreme" or "power user" by any means, but we use Paypal Here and part of it is integrated with Excel. I don't know if Google's version of Excel (don't remember name) integrates the same way. If it doesn't, that'll just add extra steps.