Pattern Finder

Free Webcast on My Productivity Suite Quadrant Report

As I noted in a post on the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog, Burton Group now offers two reports and a TeleBriefing on the subject of productivity suites. However, all three demand that a user have a subscription to Burton Group’s IT1 or CCS services. If you don’t have that kind of cash around but would like to watch a free webcast about my recently released Market Insight: Productivity Suites 2009 report, here it is on BrightTalk (it’s free, but requires a registration):

Online Productivity Suites News Roundup

As I was browsing through Google News this morning, I noticed a cluster of stories about online productivity suites. At Burton Group, we continue to have Dialogues with clients about alternatives to Microsoft Office, so I thought it would be useful to provide a subset of those stories (removing the rants) along with a précis or quote:

• Christopher Dawson, “Google Edu Apps vs. Microsoft Web Apps: Should I have waited?”, ZDNet, September 21, 2009. The Athol-Royalston School District in Massachusetts moved to Google Apps in August 2009: “students are using Apps quite naturally, even if some teachers and staff are a bit more reluctant.”
• Bryon Acohido, “Microsoft takes notice as more people use free Google Docs,” USA Today, September 21, 2009. A story highlighting IDC’s July QuickPoll saying 27% of respondents are already widely using Google Docs or expect to be within a year, and then quoting Microsoft’s Chris Capossela, noting that Office 2010 will have web apps. "A healthy percentage of Google Docs adoption is coming from ad hoc use," Webster says. "It's the classic case of employees making use of free consumer (online) services to get their work done, without asking permission."
• Tim Anderson, “Microsoft's Office Web Apps - a long way from here: Inside the (half-baked) tech preview,” Channel Register, September 21, 2009. A catalogue of the pluses and minuses of the Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps: “The Office Web Apps look great, present a familiar Office-like user interface, and generally render faithfully. The Silverlight-driven previews look particularly good, with smooth zooming and the ability to pop-out documents into a separate window. The main hesitations are around the limited editing features and the poor performance, which we must hope will be fixed before release.”
• Jason Brooks, “REVIEW: Office Web Apps Will Pose Strong Counterattack Against Google Apps, Zoho,” eWeek, September 21, 2009. “Microsoft recently pulled back the curtain on its Office Web Apps in the form of a limited-access technical preview, and according to eWeek Labs' tests so far, the Office Web Apps suite—while studded with its fair share of tech preview warts—signals that Microsoft's counterattack on the online office encroachment of Google, Zoho and others is off to a solid start.”
• Zack Whittaker, “Students vs. Google Apps vs. Office Web Apps,” ZDNet, September 22, 2009. A student at the University of Kent in the UK compares Google Apps with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.
• Barry Collins, “Microsoft Office Web Apps review: first look,” PC Pro, September 22, 2009. “Although it’s clearly very early days for these online apps, the obvious fear is that Office Web Apps will only be useful for editing documents created in the desktop software, and of limited use when attempting to create documents from scratch. That may be a sensible move for a company seeking to protect its desktop software revenues, but will disappoint anyone hoping the Web Apps would provide an alternative to the regular Office upgrade cycle. Indeed, if you want to make Web Apps part of your company’s workflow - or even your own - you’ll need to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010.”

Google: Going Around IT Again

Mike Gotta pointed me to a post over at ReadWriteWeb entitled, "Google Apps Campaign: How Not to Influence IT Experts." Google has started a billboard campaign to urge enterprises to start using Google Apps (since it's mostly been a bust in large enterprises). There's also a web site--Google Apps "Spread the Word"--that encourages employees to convince IT to move to Google Apps. Dana Oshiro, the author, notes (and I think correctly),

Meanwhile Google Apps enthusiasts are asked to influence the very people who are already more qualified to make IT-related infrastructural decisions. In other words, if you've ever seen a non-technical employee tell an IT administrator how to do his/her job, the outcome probably wasn't pretty.

Yet commenters on the post note that change in IT often came from outside IT. This is true as well. Minicomputers became popular because they offered a way for business departments to get around the slow as molasses mainframe computer group. PC LANs, in turn, became popular because they offered a way for users to get around both the mainframe and minicomputer groups.

Google's ad campaign illustrates two things. First, the company's naivete--or stupidity, depending on your point of view--at how to deal with enterprise IT. (They tried this with Google Apps Team Edition and that wasn't a huge success.)

Second, that we're going to see a replay of history here. Yes, Google Apps is currently immature--in the same way that PC LANs were immature in their early days. Yet those bugs got fixed over time, and LANs became an IT staple. We're going to see the same thing happen with SaaS-based collaboration, content, and communication. Whether Google is the company that will deliver it is debatable, but not the fact that it will happen.

Free Google Apps Comes Back: Why This Is Bad for Enterprises

Image via CrunchBase

Um, that was another Google oopsie on July 7. After all the brouhaha about Google Apps Standard Edition going away, it turns out that it isn't. The TechCrunch article has an update stating, "A Google spokesperson says, 'In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.'"

So take yesterday's post and turn it upside down. The Enterprise Division continues to be a hobby at Google: it's subsidized by ad revenue rather than standing on its own two feet. Bummer. I thought Google had finally seen the way to serving enterprises. Oopsie on my part. 

Free Google Apps Goes Away: Why This Is Good for Enterprises

Image via CrunchBase

Google made a splash yesterday by burying the sign-up hyperlink to Google Apps Standard Edition (free) and pointing people instead to the $50/user/year version: Google Apps Premier Edition. The title of TechCrunch's article about the move ("What The Hell Happened to the Free Version of Google Apps?") hints at the general reaction. Several commenters said they felt that Google was violating its "Don't be evil" mantra with this move.

At a superficial level, this is about Google's plowing ahead with a different pricing strategy, leaving some miffed users and prospects in its wake. However, at a deeper level, this announcement signals a major organizational change at Google.

Think about it. Google has been following this dual pricing strategy for 2.5 years--it could have easily kept on a steady course. Why did it change? My guess is that upper management told the Enterprise Division that it would have to start paying its own way--it could no longer live off of ad subsidies.

In other words, this is Google saying, "Let's figure out if we have a viable business here: let's stop treating Google Apps like a lark and get serious." (A hint of the "get serious" attitude is that yesterday Google also removed the beta status from Google Apps.) If the supposition that the Enterprise Division is being told it has to stand on its own two feet is correct, that implies something else: that the Enterprise Division will be able to call its own shots. With its own money coming in, it will be able to develop the apps it needs, rather than making do with hand-me-downs (such as Google Apps) from the consumer side of the house.

In my view, the Enterprise Division has been sort of hamstrung by being a hobby at Google. (Not completely hamstrung--the Google Search Appliance, derived from Google's web search expertise, has been a big hit and a money-maker. However, Google Apps hasn't taken off with enterprises because Google hasn't made the necessary feature changes that enterprises need.) Living or dying based on paying customers will concentrate the mind of the Enterprise Division wonderfully, and that will be good for enterprises. 

The $64,000 Question: Google Docs, Acrobat.com, or Other?

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

Google Apps: Syncing Outlook with Gmail

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, Google announced Google Apps Sync for Outlook, which allows enterprises to keep the Outlook client on the front end while replacing Microsoft Exchange on the backend. From an organizational point-of-view, this allows IT to save money (usually) on e-mail administration without disrupting end-user life (since most companies use Outlook on the desktop).

Some comments, stories on the announcement:

• Google Blog: "Use Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps for email, contacts, and calendar"
• CNet: "Google plots Exchange escape with Outlook plug-in"
• TechCrunch: "Google Takes Another Swipe at Microsoft. Enterprise Apps Now Sync with Outlook."
• VentureBeat: "Google Apps syncs with Outlook--a cure for cloud computing angst"

For those paying attention to this market (or reading Burton Group reports), this announcement is not a huge surprise. Actually, the surprise is more that it took Google this long--2.3 years since announcing Google Apps--to figure out that it needed to offer this functionality. (Cisco's recognition that it needed to support Outlook as a client for SaaS e-mail was the driver behind its acquisition of PostPath last year.) In short, this software frontend/SaaS-backend architecture is required to penetrate this market. As we noted last year in the Software as a Service Enterprise E-Mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind report:

If the SaaS e-mail solution forces users to learn a new user interface, it can be a huge disruption to the majority of employees and the change will be visible to the entire corporation. However, if only the mail server is replaced and business users can continue to work as they have in the past, then a SaaS e-mail solution is effectively just a back end swap out. This makes it similar to installing a new blade server; thus, only the chief financial officer (CFO), rather than the large user population, needs to be convinced of the need for the change.

June 9: Google Apps Announcements?

Image via CrunchBase

A rumor is floating around that on Tuesday, June 9, Google will host a get together in San Francisco to spotlight Google Apps. The company will make some Google Apps announcements and have some corporate customers talk about the product.

Hopefully, the company will do more than brag about the fact that GAPE recently began supporting Office 2007 documents. Given that the spec has been out for three years and some of the applicable code is open source, that recent announcement is one that underwhelms me.

Here are some that would do the opposite:

• "We've scrapped the code we inherited from the consumer business, completely rewritten the apps, and we're happy to report that Google Apps Premier Edition is now enterprise ready."
• "To highlight that Google Apps is much more of a collaboration product than a productivity suite product, we're renaming Google Apps to Google Collaboration."
• "Google Apps has been rewritten using Adobe AIR or Microsoft Silverlight so the user interface is much close to a rich client without all the overhead."
• "We have finally rewritten the underlying data model for Google Apps Premier Edition so that administration is much easier, security is stronger, and records management is built in, rather than an afterthought."

Now we just have to wait and see what Google actually says.

The Shifting Sands of Product Archetypes

It's taken me a long time to figure this out, but I recently realized that clients often view and describe products via archetypes. Rather than recounting a long laundry list of desired features, they'll say, "What I want is something like SharePoint, but with an additional capability." Initially, I classified this common way of talking as a time-saver, but I've come to realize its also a very useful market analysis tool--because the archetypes shift over time.

Let me give some examples. Way back when--40 years ago--if you wanted a really deluxe typewriter, you dreamed of an IBM Selectric. It looked cool, it had that nifty rotating ball, and made beautiful copies. When I entered college, my mind's eye was on a Selectric--but I made do with a Smith Corona. By the late 70's, people's mental image of the Selectric was replaced with a Wang Word Processor; which in turn eventually got replaced by a PC running Microsoft Word. Another example in terms of portable entertainment is the Sony Walkman; it got usurped by the Apple iPod. If your product is the archetype, you control the market conversation--your product is the baseline by which other products are described and evaluated.

The Tsunami of Google Wave

Image via CrunchBase

Well, Google certainly made a big splash with Wave at its I/O Conference. (Backstory: Google sent me an invitation. However, since Google Apps Premier Edition has been such a wet squib, I decided not to go. Oh, well, live and learn.)

The media has gone into over-hype drive, asking the wrong questions such as, "Is this the end of e-mail?" and "Is this the downfall of SharePoint?" (Uh, the short answer is "No" and "No.") These are the wrong questions because they look at this announcement through a technical lens: will this technology replace that technology? The better question to ask is, "How will this affect business viewpoints and processes?" And from that vantage point, Google Wave is a significant announcement.

It's significant because Google Wave makes physical a groundswell towards contextual collaboration that has been building for some time. There are a bunch of communications technologies (e.g., e-mail, IM), collaboration technologies (e.g., social networking, workspaces), and content technologies (e.g., productivity suites, document sharing) that the market has always perceived as separate. Google Wave takes them, munges them together, and allow workers to perform both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration within a work context. Rather than making the worker open an e-mail application and a word processing application and an IM application, the worker just works. The three Cs come to him, rather than him going to them. The impact of Wave is that it's an instantiation of a vision that many people--including Burton Group--have been talking about for a long time.

In the real world, what that means is enterprises will start to say to vendors, "I want a Wave-like product." Google has given them a new product category to ask for. So give Google an A+ for vision and market impact. However, they'll probably earn a much lower grade for delivering on the promise for large enterprises. There's a bunch of dynamics at work here.

Google Apps: The Latest, Latest Glitch

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch is pointing to a blog post by security consultant Ade Barkah, who is reporting that he's found some security issues with Google Docs:

1. No protection for embedded images: If you embed an image within a document that you shared with someone, if you later revoke their access to the document or even delete the document, they can still see the image.
2. All versions of diagrams are stored and remain accessible: If you've revised a document multiple times and consequently it includes multiple revisions of an embedded diagram, people with access to the document can still go back to previous versions of the diagram by altering the revision number in the URL.
3. Viewers whose access privileges have been revoked can still access documents in some cases: "Even if you unshare a document with a person, that person can in certain cases still access your document without your permission, a serious breach of privacy.  For now I’m withholding the mechanics of when/why/how this happens, pending further research and feedback from Google if any."

This is beginning to get tedious. A little over two weeks ago I had a post about another lapse in Google Docs security. Rather than tedious, Google's lack of response for five business days is alarming. Ade says,

These findings are based upon my investigations stemming from Issue #1 above.  I disclosed this particular issue to Google on March 18.  I tend to follow rfpuppy’s Full Disclosure Policy and so waited five business days for Google to comment.  I’ve yet received any response from Google other than the usual automated, canned reply (which I don’t consider a real response.)[Update 3/26: I'm now in contact with Google Security.]

Note that Google didn't reply until Ade went public.

This is yet another example of how Google--fundamentally--does not understand selling to the enterprise. First, during the entire two plus years of availability of Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE), it looks like it never had a code walkthrough to ponder the possibility of this behavior. (Given Google's branding pitch of hiring only really really smart people, I find this hard to believe.) Or, if it did, it decided it wasn't a risk worth fixing. Second, rather than issuing a quick "Thank you, we're working on it" to Ade for doing their work for them, they ignored the issue until it started turning into a PR fiasco.

When I wrote my first 55-page report on GAPE back in August 2007, I was not kind to Google, saying GAPE was not ready for primetime in large enterprises. Although I didn't say so in the report, frankly, I was figuring Google would fix the issues over time (e.g., embedded e-mail distribution lists, administration by role) and by now it would have a competitive package. Now I'm inclined to think that's never going to happen. 

Google Apps: The Latest Glitch--Marking Private Documents Public

Image via Wikipedia

It recently came to light that a small percentage of the documents stored in Google Apps were available when they should have been locked down. Apparently, if a document owner or collaborator with sharing rights had previously shared a document and then altered its sharing rights by altering the sharing rights of multiple documents at once, then those documents were still accessible. This issue applied to word processing documents and presentations; it did not affect spreadsheets. Google discussed this issue in the Docs Help forum; other stories are here: CNet, PCWorld, TechCrunch).

Google, of course, is soft-pedaling the issue, estimating that it affected less that 0.05% of the documents stored in Google Apps. However, if you do the math, the number of affected documents runs into the hundreds of thousands. As of September 2008, Google was saying 500,000 companies were using Google Apps, with 3,000 companies signing up per day. That comes out to roughly 800,000 companies now (500,000 + 300,000 [3,000 x 20 business days in a month, times five months (October-February)]. Assuming each company has 50 documents stored (a conservative number), that comes out to 40 million documents. 0.05% of that number is 200,000 documents: not a small number. In addition, I would argue the scenario Google describes is the one you would take with laid off employees--as employees, they would have had access to the documents; after you laid them off, you would have stopped their access to the whole set of documents in a library. So while the percentage of affected documents is low, the scenario is one that could do you damage.

This is not to say the same problem doesn't happen with software-based systems: companies forget to remove logins for laid-off employees and former partners; employees load up their portable USB keys with confidential documents all the time. But it does show that SaaS-based solutions are not heralding in a new era of pristine perfection, as the feel-good presentations from companies like Google and Salesforce.com often imply. Once again, enterprises pondering a move to the cloud need to think through the perils of entrusting their information to a third party.