Despite holding grassroots appeal among guerrilla IT workers fed up with IT's sluggish responses to their requests, Google Apps' traction in the enterprise remains overblown. Sure, Google claims more than 500,000 companies have signed up for Google Apps, but according to Gartner, only a handful of employees at each company uses the tools. Comparing that with Microsoft Office's 500 million users, Garnter analyst Tom Austin calls Google Apps' cloud-computing impression on the enterprise 'a raindrop.'
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Member since:2006-01-23
Member since:2006-11-17
Mobility, perhaps?
It's not desktop quality, but when I'm in a new place, I don't want to setup my pop3, install my office tools, and copy the data from my usb key and then start work. I want to launch whatever browser is available and start work. Then I don't want to deal with backups and security. Google does that for me. I only want to do the actual work wherever I am.
It's not desktop quality, but it is available everywhere. Look at the webmail. How many people are still using thunderbird or outlook these days? Those who need the extra functionality, but for the other 90%, webmail is quite enough and available here, there and over there. How many people need to put highres videos on their documents? Not me actually. My documents are very simple and Google apps is more enough for my needs.
Member since:
2008-03-10
Sorry, All the talk about web apps over taking desktop apps has always been ridiculous from the start. It's always been about senseless speculation while every reason in the book can be thrown against it. Security, thinking people will leave personal PCs, etc... they're all ridiculous. I should abandon using a PC that can play h264 video and edit high resolution images for some web terminal that can't? Then the quality compared to native is always terrible. If you want web apps that would be remotely useful you would at least need a way of writing files to the users hard drive, and the only way of that is to use something like java.
And it's not like hardware acceleration is going to ever be reasonable either.
Edited 2008-07-03 20:19 UTC