Last week I spent the day at Xero’s Australian convention speaking to various cloud service companies, bookkeepers and accountants.
One of the notable organisations missing in the conversations was Google – two or three years ago, Google Apps would have been at the front and centre of conversations about cloud services and integration. Yesterday the company was barely mentioned.
Part of the reduced buzz around Google Apps at XeroCon is due to Xero’s closer relationship with Microsoft, but it also betrays how Google Docs is no longer the smartest, newest product on the block.
“We tried to eat their dog food, but our staff rebelled,” one manager of a marketing agency who worked with Google told me. “We thought we’d go Google Apps for all the work we were doing with them but we just found the products lacked the functions we needed.”
The main problem for business users are Google Docs’ slimmed down feature. While most people don’t use 95% of the tools included in Microsoft Word or Excel, each person uses a different 5% and find something critical missing from the cloud based challenger.
For writers, Google Docs’ lack of a word count function is a deal breaker. Speakers find the Presentation function far too basic concerned to the Microsoft Powerpoint or Apple Keynote packages.
In the cloud computing industry, Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are all important as these allow other services to plug into data and enhance value for users. Over the last two years, Microsoft have done a good job in cultivating their developer community while Google have taken theirs for granted.
Most importantly though is that Google seems to have lost focus on their productivity suite, it may be another example of the company’s corporate attention deficit disorder, or it may be be that Microsoft have seen off another challenge to their dominance in that sector.
If it is the latter, then Microsoft have done a good job with Office 365 in seeing off the threat that Google posed.
Despite the company’s challenges in the post-PC, post- Gates era it would be dangerous to write Microsoft off.
Are you sure that Google Docs doesn’t have a word count feature?
Apparently word count was recently added, the last time I used Google Docs it didn’t but it’s just one of dozens of features that leave Microsoft ahead.
Thanks, would you be able to elaborate on the missing features? I’m seriously looking at introducing Google Docs to my business, and am interested in what other missing features you see as “deal breakers”.
Hi Scott, I’ve been thinking about getting back into some reviews but the problem I see with comparing Google Docs with Microsoft Office is that every person’s needs are different.
With Google Docs, it’s safe to say if your needs are very basic then it will work for you otherwise you might want to look at MS Office or something more specialised.