Effortless computing

Don Dodge, Microsoft Google evangelist, sums up Google’s pitch to businesses -

Google has a two pronged approach for enterprises moving to the Cloud. Google Apps has packaged applications like Gmail, calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Video, and other commonly used applications. Enterprises can get immediate cost savings by moving these routine every day applications to the cloud, and free up IT resources to focus on more strategic issues.

Google AppEngine provides a custom development environment and scalable deployment infrastructure. Enterprise developers can build custom applications using the same systems that power Google applications, with built-in scalability leveraging things like BigTable and GFS.

At Conosco, we steer our small & mid-sized IT support customers away from any form of custom development – it rarely makes any sense for them. But the Apps suite is increasingly attractive, especially for startups, and it’s easy to move over to it gradually as Don says.

A useful summary from Tim Anderson of the differing strategies of Microsoft and Google in the email/document space. If I knew the winner, I’d place my bet in the stock market… but the collaborative power of Google Apps and the functional maturity of MS Office mean that both are compelling and neither is likely to beat out the other for some years.

Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.

Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.

Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.

Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.

Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.

Google launched a major poster campaign in the UK today – here’s the spoof:

We were promised a preview of Microsoft’s web-based Office applications this summer – and now they offer only a dud preview to selected pundits. Meanwhile Google’s web apps have infiltrated up to 20% of companies and can enjoy at least another year’s viral growth before the MS products launch.

The MS preview sounds too early-stage to bother picking holes in – many features are missing or broken – but MS appear to want us to use the web apps as ‘lite’ versions, reverting to the desktop apps for serious work. Apart from large spreadsheets, which I can’t see running fast enough in a web browser, this misses the point: the joy of web apps is being able to entirely drop the desktop apps – being able to work from any computer you find to hand, not having to worry about upgrades and versions, not having to remember to upload and backup your docs.

Google apps users are learning to do more with less – and doing fine. Only corporate inertia will save Microsoft from itself now.

Surprisingly strong support for web applications in general and especially Google Apps from a survey of UK small businesses.

• 71% aware of Google Apps
• 13% intend and 22% are considering switching to Google Apps – as many as have decided not to switch
• 62% prefer to have business apps work through a browser
• 32% use firefox as default browser
• 8% intend to upgrade to W7

The survey covered 1400 Microsoft customers, so we have to assume it’s a representative sample of our small businesses. If so, these are astonishing numbers. Google Apps is immature and buggy (though sometimes impressive) and is far from a direct replacement for MS Office, but it’s clearly made itself widely known and seduced many (including Conosco – we use, resell and offer our IT support services for it).

The number preferring web apps suggests that the browser-based computing team has won already, and the high use of Firefox suggests a maturity in their users (MS’s Internet Explorer was awful for web apps until the very recent release of IE8).

These would be bad enough for MS – which is still pushing desktop apps, with browser apps for occasional light use – but the W7 uptake is dreadful. Ironically, upgrading to W7 is clearly the right course – it’s far better than its predecessors Vista and XP.

Microsoft has announced a new version of Outlook for the Mac – for late 2010. This is good news for many Mac users, irrelevant for many others and might indicate some desperation at Redmond.

It’s good news because Mac users have never had a good way to connect to MS Exchange, the dominant mail/calendar server for businesses. MS dropped Mac.Outlook after 1998, offering OS X users the Entourage program – which was and still is a dog: it lacks many Outlook features and is horrible to use. The new Outlook promises to have the same features as Windows.Outlook whilst being a true Mac application – e.g. storing data in files rather than a huge database (source of most Outlook problems).

Why did MS hobble Outlook/Entourage for the Mac? Presumably because Exchange has been essential for most businesses, so this would keep business users on Windows and perpetuate sales of MS Office. Indeed, Outlook is theirreplaceable part of Office – powerful, effective and unrivalled. Up to now, this has worked – at Conosco we’ve discouraged our customers from Macs for good practical reasons.

So why this change of heart and why announce it now, more than a year before it’s due? FUD – the old MS trick of spiking the opposition. Within a month Apple releases the Snow Leopard upgrade to OS X, which makes the Mac’s native mail and calendar apps work properly with Exchange. And many are now moving to web-based services such as Google Apps and Zoho anyway.

Too little too late. MS has probably lost the Apple community now – if you can drop Entourage/Outlook, you can drop MS Office (there are already good alternatives to Word/Excel/Powerpoint). Macs are eating into the PC market – in the last few months we’ve suddenly started selling a lot of Macs at Conosco. The best hope for MS is that their new software+service version of Office can outflank the competition – but it’s not even in beta yet.

Microsoft has announced details of Office 2010. Techcrunch has a complete guide – highlights include

• Free web versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel, with stripped-down functionality (but more than Google’s apps)
• Three screens strategy allows the apps to synchronise across phone, browser and desktop
• Word allows multiple users to work on a document at the same time (not available with the web version)
• Thread view for email messages in Outlook (about time)

We’ll hold judgement until we’ve actually tried the apps, but it looks good enough to defend some of Fortress Office, though Google has clearly undermined some of the walls and may still have the edge in some areas

• Real-time document collaboration is a huge advancement. In Google’s spreadsheet app, this feature alone outweighs many of MS Office’s fancy functions in usefulness. MS appears to be lagging.
• Most people use only a tiny fraction of MS Office’s features, so the free web versions may be sufficient for a large chunk of the userbase – hitting MS’s revenues hard.
• MS’s software + services (i.e. desktop and web-based) is a potential winner for heavier users of Office – you can do the complex work on a desktop, and fall back on the browser for convenience. For instance, Google spreadsheets are hopelessly slow with large datasets and models.

UPDATE: Wired has had a better look

• Web-Excel will allow real-time collaboration but the web versions of Word and PowerPoint won’t (for now)
• Mac Office users won’t be able to use the integration between desktop and web apps until the new Mac version of Office appears (2011?)
• MS’s strategy appears – unsurprisingly – to be to make the desktop apps essential and the web apps a useful appendage. For instance, it appears that you have to create documents with the desktop apps; you can then do simple editing with the web apps.

If this last point is true, MS are trying to seize the horns of the innovator’s dilemma – when someone overtakes your innovation (we won’t dwell on that point), do you continue with the old or switch to the new? MS might be trying to do both. Given inertia in the market, they might succeed.

Microsoft SharePoint, the powerful but unintuitive filesharing platform* for businesses, has lacked an easy way to edit and collaborate on documents – you were meant to download docs, edit them on your desktop, and upload them again. Not only is this too laborious, but it allowed conflicts between different people editing the same doc.

Now Zoho, the best-featured set of web-based document apps, will integrate with your SharePoint file storage, allowing you to edit docs directly from SharePoint. Looks great (we haven’t tried it yet) and moves SharePoint into the realms of easy useability (if you can figure out how to structure your folder hierarchy in it).

Watch the video -

Sadly for Zoho, I can’t help feeling that, once MS releases its own web-based doc editors, they will get squeezed between MS and Google Apps.

* Yes, it does much more, but the cost of configuring it is far too high for smaller businesses. Just administering the file sharing takes skill and learning.

If you haven’t watched the Google Wave Preview – do. It’s a breathtaking re-thinking of email, instant messaging, collaborative working and much more. It should reach us later this year and will be open-source so others can build applications around it.

The developers, led by the creator of Google Maps, have broken the barriers between various forms of internet communications – email, IM, web, filesharing, etc – and solved many of the frustrations of their current implementations.

In Wave, a wave is a tree-structure of communications that can branch into sub-conversations and shift effortlessly in form between documents, email, instant messages, images and files. (No doubt Google Voice will get a look-in in due course.)

You can add and remove people from various parts of the wave, to break off into private asides or to bring in new people (who can watch a playback of the wave to help them catch up).

You can embed a wave in a blog or web page allowing many others to interact with it just as your private circle of invited contacts would do.

And all this is real-time – you see people typing (unless they turn this off), so you aren’t stuck looking at today’s ‘Fred is still learning to type’ message in an instant messenger.

It appears to outstrip the venerable MS Word ‘tracking’ feature that lets teams collaborate on documents – now you can have conversations around edits and many can work on a document at once. MS Groove tries to do this, but it’s tricky to set up and use – Wave appears natural and effortless*.

This will segue neatly into Google Docs – the developers promise to take it into Google’s spreadsheet app and further.

And i’ve watched only a third of an 80 minute show… have a look and wonder!

*Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, bizarrely responded that Wave is too complex and anti-web. Our money’s on Google doing simplicity better than Microsoft – but you have to respect Ozzie, who invented Lotus Notes and Groove.