Google Announces Office Suite, Takes Aim at Microsoft
Today, Google announced the release of its Google Apps for Your Domain, the company's suite of web-based office products. The suite is a combination of several Google productivity tools that are already available as beta versions, but this new configuration will add user management functions, mail management and additional sharing features.
Right now, the Google Apps for Your Domain suite includes the GMail e-mail app with the full 2GB of storage per user, instant messaging, Google Calendar and a simple web page creation tool. Even though the data is all hosted and backed up by Google, the service is BYO-domain, and every package will be branded with each company's domain name and logos. The New York Times has a high-level view, and Information Week has a deeper, more geek-friendly walk through.
Soon, Google plans to add Google Spreadsheets and its Writely word processor. These two apps will allow users to open, edit and share Microsoft Excel and Word documents within the browser. This is the development that has the analysts salivating — it marks Google's boldest move yet into the desktop productivity domain owned by Microsoft. Redmond has its own plan for a collaborative, hosted version of Office. Microsoft's Office SharePoint 2007, the suite of collaborative business tools, is set for release this fall. Windows Vista, due in January 2007, will also have integrated web-based collaboration features that work with its Office products.
Essentially, Google Apps and Live Office allow customers to do the same things: manage contacts, mail, documents and workflows from any location. Google's suite is a little more flexible in that it's platform agnostic and it doesn't require any software beyond a compatible web browser. However, Microsoft's tools are more robust — Writely works perfectly about 99% of the time, but Google Spreadsheets still has a way to go before it's a true Excel killer — and there's no denying the power of a known, trusted brand among business users and enterprise technology buyers. As powerful and well-known as Google is, its still the new kid on the block when it comes to document management, spreadsheets and chat.
Google acknowledges this. As Google's Matt Glotzbach told Information Week's Aaron Ricadela, "The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn't necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel. They're the collaboration component of that."
That's a modest statement. Still, Google is making the smart move by initially concentrating on the small and medium business (SMB) market. The usage fee for the full version of the Google Apps for Your Domain will include phone support, and it could be the right price and size for a start-up or a small shop. Especially one with employees working off-site and collaborating frequently. One thing that surprised me was that Google didn't announce any integration with Blogger or any wiki components, because it seems to me that small businesses within their target market could make excellent use of those two tools.
