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Google Apps updates: Enough to contest with Office 2010
Posted on 2012-Feb-1 at 11:46 - Post Comment
 As with most things in tech, that depends! As Sam Diaz pointed out in his coverage of the updates from the Atmosphere event From monday, “microsoft project 2010 has been aggressively targeting its cloud-based microsoft project professional 2010 provides flexible choices to simplify planning. at the enterprise, hosting events like these to spread the word on the strength of the suite! ” So has Google made its case? In many ways, the develop and enhancements represented by these updates are just enough to provide the average user with everything they need: more reasonable control of layout, improved formula handling, better previews, and improved fidelity! The very fact that Docs has a ruler with tab stops, margins, and indents will adequately microsoft project 2007-ize the screen for a lot of users! This goes back to the original question I posed in the headline of this blog: Do the updates to Google Apps make it competitive with Office 2010? It all depends on how you use the products! The sort of document layout control that Google has added to Docs was never an area of the original vision for the online suite! Docs was all about producing content collaboratively, most of which was going to end up online anyway, where document margins and tab stops are unnecessary! However, as it became clear that Docs would need to contest with Office and Sharepoint as an inexpensive cloud-based alternative to the Microsoft ecosystem, features to make Apps look, feel, and behave more like an office suite became necessary! So now Docs has a ruler! Office 2010 has more features than I'd care to count and will be a crucial set of tools for power users! It blows anything else out there away! It's also going to be bloody expensive! The updates to Apps, on the other hand, not only move users closer to the ideal of any-browser, anywhere access to their files via HTML 5, but also come at no additional cost! Is a ruler revolutionary? Of course not, but it's remarkably handy! I really value the ability to produce and manage print-ready documents from any cell phone browser and the growing capabilities to access and modify documents via selected smartphones on the market is incredibly welcome for those of us who make full use of Docs as a repository for what we write and create! Add to that enhancements to spreadsheet functionality and the ability to collaboratively create drawings like the one below, and Apps becomes very compelling! However, Apps is not going to steal too many customers who really leverage the strength of Office! It's going to appeal to the same organizations who value ubiquitous, inexpensive access to collaborative documents and who have either already taken Apps or were waiting for incremental improvements to “go Google! ” Can Apps contest with Office? Not feature-for-feature and even most organizations who go Google will probably use Office, InDesign, or other desktop products to make production-ready documents and websites! However, groups can design highly effective workflows around creation of content in the cloud, with a solid spit-shine on the desktop! Depending on their needs, others can simply push Apps content straight to the web and make use of its webcentricity! In these cases, it doesn't need to compete feature-for-feature; it needs to make it easy to work in a cell phone browser instead of on a computer! In that way, Apps is not just competitive but utterly predominant! So what do you need from your productivity applications? Soon you answer that question, you can't answer the question of competitiveness!
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