Karl Katzke

I read this article on ReadWriteWeb about how Google Apps aren’t ready to be used in the Enterprise, according to Microsoft. It was originally published by Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet.

Ok, let’s take a look at these claims one by one.

1. Google touts having enterprise level customers but how many “USERS” of their applications truly exist within the enterprise?

How many USERS of Microsoft Office are there? The question’s FUD. (FUD, for those of you who don’t know, is an acronym for “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.”) Of course there are more people that use Microsoft Office, and have for years. But Google Apps is free. I know it’s in use in four enterprises, by the entire staff, that I know of. Google, of course, doesn’t publish their use numbers, so the question’s not even answerable.

2. Google has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software, and issuing updates on a “known only to Google” schedule – this flies in the face of what enterprises want and need in their technology partners – what is Google doing that indicates they are in lock step with customer needs?

What, as opposed to Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday, where we reboot all of your computers on OUR schedule”, OpenOffice.org.

4. Google’s primary focus is on ad funded search. Their enterprise focus and now apps exist on the very fringe and in combination with other fringe services only account for 1% of the company’s revenue. What happens if Google executes poorly? Do they shut down given it will them in a minimal and short term way? Should customers trust that this won’t happen?

Oh, because there’s nothing else that Google has focused on. And how do we know Microsoft’s going to be around in a few years? Especially since they failed to execute well on Vista and they’ve got Apple’s marketshare increasing drastically and Linux right behind it nipping at everyone’s heels?

5. Google’s apps only work if an enterprise has no power users, employees are always online, enterprises haven’t built custom Office apps – doesn’t this equal a very small % of global information workers today? –On a feature comparison basis, it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a huge lead.

When aren’t employees online today? My office’s facebook usage certainly indicates that employees are always online. And yes, Microsoft has been around a lot longer. What percentage of users are power users?

6. Google apps don’t have essential document creation features like support for headers, footers, tables of content, footnotes, etc. Additionally, while customers can collaborate on basic docs without the above noted features, to collaborate on detailed docs, a company must implement a two part process – work together on the basic doc, save it to Word or Excel and then send via email for final edits. Yes they have a $50 price tag, but with the inefficiencies created by just this one cycle, how much do GAPE really cost – and can you afford the fidelity loss?

Ooh! A hit, a palpable hit! Of course, that’s saying that you’re intending to turn the document into paper, and not paste it into a page layout software like InDesign or Quark. Or turn it into a website. Or a PDF. Or any number of any other document formats where you won’t be using Microsoft Office for anything… which is the majority of documents in my office at least. Microsoft’s allegation that Google Apps isn’t feature complete is correct, but that’s claiming that the world is still tied 100% to paper instead of the electronic document formats that everything seems to actually be going towards. Remember, all anyone should ever need is 512k of RAM!

7. Enterprise companies have to constantly think about government regulations and standards – while Google can store a lot of data for enterprises on Google servers, there is no easy to use, automated way for enterprises to regularly delete data, issue a legal hold for specific docs or bring copies into the corp. What happens if a company needs to respond to government regulations bodies? Google touts 99.9% uptime for their apps but what few people realize that promise is for Gmail only. Equally alarming is the definition Google has for “downtime” – ten consecutive minutes of downtime. What happens if throughout the day Google is down 7 minutes each hour? What does 7 minutes each hour for a full work day that cost an enterprise?

Most companies these days enforce the deletion of email on a one month basis so that they can’t be subpoena’d for the documents. It’s pretty easy to do this from the administrator account that Google provides. The other issue of downtime — Microsoft, don’t even get me started on downtime. How about the 7 minutes each hour that I spend rebooting my freaking computer because your operating system sucks?

9. Google says that enterprise customers use only 10% of the features in today’s productivity applications which implies that EVERYONE needs the SAME 10% of the feature when in fact it is very clear that in each company there are specific roles people play that demands access to specific information – how does Google’s generic strategy address role specific needs?

About the same way’s that Microsoft’s does … they throw it at the wall and see what sticks. I’ll bet that Google’s got much better usage statistics on features than Microsoft does, considering that they could quite easily track every single mouse click…

10. With Google apps in perpetual beta and Google controlling when and if they rollout specific features and functionality, customers have minimal if any control over the timing of product rollouts and features – how do 1) I know how to strategically plan and train and 2) get the features and functionality I have specifically requested? How much money does not knowing cost?

Who the heck strategically plans and trains their users on MS goods? I’ve seen this service offered constantly by Microsoft Partners, but I’ve never ever heard of one of my clients or any other that has made use of it. In my experience, enterprises roll out the next version of Office bout a year after it comes out and train their people at that point … well after features have already been rolled out and debugged. I mean, not that we’ve ever had cases of Microsoft products being nigh unusable until SP2…

Gee, the FUD sure is deep in here. Just remember that it flows both ways. For every FUD-generating straw man that Microsoft tries to put under the eyes of the executives, it’s the line level people that actually know what’s going on that that help dispell it.