Tag Archive for 'Google apps'

Google hosted apps satire

Published by Ben Kepes on May 7, 2008 in Efficiency, Humour, IT and SaaS.

I ran into this the other day…

Intermedia.NET, the US leader in Microsoft Exchange hosting for small and medium businesses (SMBs), today praised the innovative new service, Google Apps for Your Domain. By offering 24×0 support, no wireless access and scanning of company email and documents, Google has bucked the trend of what companies expect from a business email provider. The Apps for your Domain key features:

* 24×0 support. This is important because companies for whom email and schedules are mission-critical will want to know they can pick up a phone and get support 24 hours a day, 0 days per week. Google also gives the option of filling out a support form and receiving an automated response.

* No wireless access. Where Intermedia.NET hosted Exchange gives users access to information via BlackBerry, Treo, Q or any other device, Google has bucked this trend, perhaps suggesting that wireless email is in fact a productivity-sapping distraction for employees.

* Private data read by others. Google Apps for your Desktop again bucks the trend that businesses should not allow outsiders to read their proprietary documents and email. Businesses can rest easy knowing that Google is looking at all emails and documents.

* Ads inside applications. Clearly, employees are more productive when their business applications stream ads for online poker sites and pills to combat ED.

* No uptime guarantee. Rather than a predictable 99.9% uptime guarantee, such as the one offered by Intermedia.NET, Google does not provide a set percentage of the time when email will be up and running. This keeps corporate collaboration more exciting, by allowing staff to guess whether the system will be working or not.

“While we are happy that Google is making people aware that business-quality email is essential for small and medium businesses, we do have some reservations,” said Serguei Sofinski, CEO of Intermedia.NET. “There is a large difference between an enterprise-class, proven Microsoft Exchange system with 24×7 fully-managed telephone support and wireless access, and a more basic offering with 24×0 support, embedded ads and no wireless access.”

Of course they fail to mention that Google apps is free - which is pretty persuasive compared to intermedia.net’s $11.95/month for the most basic service and a wopping $575 per month for the 50 mailbox account.

Horses for courses I guess…

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Microsoft gets a trifecta!

Published by Ben Kepes on April 23, 2008 in Design, IT, SaaS and Strategy.

I’d avoided posting about Microsoft’s latest offering, Albany, because there is really not much anyone in the SaaS world can find to say about it…. I can’t resist however so here goes.

Basically it seems that Albany is a way to derive some revenue out of existing products that aren’t doing so well. There are a few “innovations” -  Microsoft has changed the pricing model (suggestions are that it’ll be a $12 month service), and they’re building some kind of wrapper whereby users can have a one click set up of their product (although it’s not an ERP system they’re selling here, just how many clicks are needed to set up Zoho or Google apps anyway?).

The other “value-add” is that along with the subscription, users have the right to download later versions of the bloat software as they become available, the fact that Office tends to release cycle only once or twice a decade kind of leads me to say that up to date office productivity software isn’t a huge issue for most users. Add to that the fact that already MS office includes about 10 times the functionality that most users need and you’ve got a feature of very dubious benefit.

The bottom line (and something that MS strategists should really point out to those making these product decisions) is as follows;

  • Those who need all of Office’s super functionality will continue to use top shelf versions of MS office (read enterprise users)
  • Those who need a lightweight, simple and cheap alternative will use just that - Google apps, Zoho or one of the other offerings - Albany is neither lightweight, simple nor cheap, an unfortunate trifecta

I know Microsoft’s strategy is one of software + services and they’ll argue that Albany is just that - but it feels like a service offering that is there simply to fit into the S+S moniker - not for any real reasons…

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Salesforce and Google Apps

Published by Ben Kepes on April 15, 2008 in Design, IT, PaaS, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0.

The blogosphere is ablaze this morning on the formal announcement that Salesforce will be bundling (is it still called bundling when it’s SaaS!?) Google apps along with it’s CRM offering. There’s a bunch of analysis out there;

Phil Waineright says;

This is a huge validation for Office 2.0

Basically saying that Google benefits from SFDC’s patronage. But as we’ll see later, SFDC’s cred today isn’t neccessarily a good thing for the continuation of Office 2.0

This will spread faster than people expect or realize

Ease of use will create viral uptake - all those happy SFDC users will all of a sudden embrace Google apps - and there’s very little chance of that IMHO

This is a showcase for on-demand integration.

A poster child of aggregating SaaS - can’t argue too much there - nice use of APIs and all that

Salesforce for Google Apps is a PaaS offering.

Think enterprise level collaboration environments - Sort of… true integrating Google Apps will lend itself to more document collaboration and business process tracking. But to my mind, a god PaaS offering is more neutral than this - now if SFDC offered Google apps, Zoho and Buzzword, that’d be different

Over on Zoho blog however they’re saying that;

Very Expensive + Affordable = Still Very Expensive

SFDC is an expensive offering, teaming it with a free one is strange. SFDC is also a marketing driven bloated business model that doesn’t blend nicely with Google’s viral one. Some might say it’s a way for SFDC to get a little more hip but I’m not sure Benioff sees it that way.

So… what do I think? I have to say I’m in the camp of the detractors. Sure I love SaaS and dig aggregation, but this aggregation doesn’t make sense to me. Let’s see why:

  1. Google docs is a reasonably lightweight, primarily consumer focused offering while SFDC is a heavier true business grade one - I don’t see a huge intersect between traditional Google apps users and traditional SFDC ones - so the upside for either company is negligible
  2. Sure the ability to create docs from within SFDC is nice, but if you’re creating those docs within an app that hasn’t achieved acceptance within your organisation, it’s just a feature you’ll turn off by default
  3. If you want light(ish)weight SaaS apps along with CRM, you’ll go straight for Zoho which already has both (and very interesting to note that SFDC tried to buy Zoho or shut down their CRM offering
  4. If you want enterprise grade you’ll (and yes I hate to say it) use sharepoint/MS office and work around integrating that with your CRM

Over on Smoothspan Bob is correct when he says that;

However, the history of CRM is not 100% encouraging…..  Many salespeople view it as a necessary evil while their management uses it mostly as a forecasting tool (how much will we sell this quarter) which it does a very poor job of.  This latter creates a huge misalignment between management and the users of the CRM/SFA (Sales Force Automation) tool.  Understandably, there is a lot of pressure to close deals.  Equally understandably, salespeople may not want management to have a total surveillance view of every bit of data associated with the deal.  Most of the time what’s in Salesforce and other CRM system is a pretty carefully prepared presentation of what the salesperson wants management to see as the current status of the sale.

So the potential is there, but the true nature of CRM system may mitigate how much of the potential is realized.

Fake Steve Jobs makes an interesting point (as an aside has anyone noticed that FSJ is much less tongue in cheek and more “real world” these days) when he says that;

Benioff himself is getting disrupted by little guys like SugarCRM. You know why? Because Benioff, ironically, has built his business around a bloated, overly expensive, outdated business model, a model that comes straight out of the late Nineties — he’s running his own data center, and he’s using Sun servers and Oracle software….. Meanwhile the rest of the world has leapt ahead onto Intel architecture and Linux. For Benioff to survive into the era of the cloud he’ll have to rip up his entire architecture and rebuild it. Yeah. It’s like that. He’s stuck. And he knows it. He’s not doing cloud computing. He’s doing what we all already recognize was a precursor to the cloud.

So SFDC and Google is akin to Microsoft and Yahoo marrying - and that’d never happen…. would it?

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Offline access… important or not?

Published by Ben Kepes on April 8, 2008 in Design, IT, SaaS, Society, Strategy and Web x.0.

Over on RWW this morning, Sarah posted asking the question, “how important is offline access?”. She states in her post that;

by focusing on an offline web, one has to wonder if this is really progress: if we wanted an offline word processor, well…don’t we already have several of those available already? Shouldn’t a product like Google Docs be more focused on what makes them unique in the office suite space instead?

I can’t help but think Sarah is missing the point here. The entire rationale for SaaS delivered office productivity apps to allow for the sort of value ads that only this form of delivery allows, things like data mashups ad real time collaborative ability.

Sarah’s contention that buy offering offline functonality vendors are somehow trying to reinvent desktop software is patently absurd. What they are trying to do is to ensure that the excellent functionality they already deliver isn’t constrained by short term connectivity outages.

The fact is that Sarah writes from Tampa, Florida. I’m fairly sure she enjoys both internet speed and reliability in the top percentile of the global norm - but there’s the rub, Google and Zoho are attempting to create a viable and credible product that works for all users - not just the hyper-connected ones. To do so they rightly realise that they need to allow for inevitable outages, they also need to make their offerings sufficiently light to work with low bandwidth users.

So yes Sarah, Offline access is, and will continue to be for the forseeable future, important.

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