Pattern Finder

Google Sites: The Thing That Makes Google Apps Take Off?

Google announced Google Sites yesterday, a replacement to the relatively dismal Page Creator application. The genesis for Google Sites was JotSpot, a wiki solution that Google purchased 16 months ago. Dan Farber quotes Google as saying, "'This is a key last hole in the Google Apps suite,' Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise told me. 'It is the nucleus for other pieces to fit into for online collaboration.'"

The press reaction has been all over the place:

• CNET: Dan Farber at CNET gave a balanced overview, while noting that it took Google 16 months to come out with it, "which is like 10 years in Web time."
• The New York Times went for the "battle of the titans" theme, blaring the provocative headline, "Google Goes After Another Microsoft Cash Cow." After quoting a Forrester analyst who correctly notes, "'They are targeting a subset of the SharePoint functionality,' he said," the reporter finishes the story with the zing, "Then again, Google Sites will be free." Of course, Microsoft's Office Live Small Business is free as well--but why let the truth to get in the way of a good zinger?
• Dennis Howlett at ZDNet gives it a thumbs down in a blog entry entitled, "Google Sites - spoiled by usability issues," complaining about its slow response time and consumer-oriented gadgets.

While Google Sites is a huge improvement over Page Creator--and Google is saying it's the last missing component--I'm not convinced that this latest incarnation will be enough to get large enterprises to buy Google Apps. Google Apps has been a big success with small and medium size businesses who want to avoid paying for an IT staff for as long as they can. But the Fortune 500 companies I talk to are still nervous about the lack of some nuts and bolts features, such as 24/7 phone support, the inability to administer the system via roles, the rudimentary e-mail distribution list capabilities, and the lack of records management capabilities for documents and spreadsheets. These are non-glitzy requirements, but real requirements nevertheless.

So while Google continues to improve Google Apps from a user interface point-of-view, it hasn't improved the underlying data model--Google Apps still shows its consumer heritage. (E-mail distribution lists that contain other distribution lists have been around for 20 years--yet Google has yet to include that important enterprise feature). While that isn't hurting Google within the SMB space, it is within the larger enterprise space. The vendor race in the collaboration and content space continues.

Microsoft's Vision for FAST Search

I'm currently attending the FAST Search user conference (FASTforward 08), and yesterday Jared Spataro from Microsoft explained Microsoft's reasoning for buying FAST. (The shareholders have approved the deal, but it has not yet been completed.) He noted that the questions he gets always fall into three categories. Here are my notes from his speech:

• What’s in it for Microsoft: 18 months ago, Microsoft thought search was a set of features. Microsoft finally got religion during the SharePoint 2007 project. Consequently, a specialized team was formed to target search, and was made part of the SharePoint team. FAST came up to Microsoft right after FASTforward 2007 and demoed their capabilities. So Microsoft has been aware of FAST and its capabilities for over a year. Microsoft saw three differentiators with FAST--vision, people, technology—which is why it bought FAST rather than other vendors.
• What’s in it for FAST: Combine FAST’s depth (visionary innovations, passionate people, best-in-class technologies) and Microsoft's breadth (SharePoint momentum, complementary infrastructure technologies, sales and marketing engine) to gain faster adoption of FAST’s technologies.
• What’s in it for customers: FAST will continue to pursue both monetization (customer-facing, revenue-producing search applications) and enterprise (employee-facing, productivity-enhancing applications) segments. Customer-led innovation will continue. Customers can expect cross-platform support and innovation to continue.

I thought the most interesting part was the last bullet: Microsoft's comments that it does not plan to disrupt FAST's current segmentation strategy, that high-touch customer engagement will continue, and that it will support and extend search running on non-Windows platforms.

What I'd Love to See: Zimbra Replacing Outlook Web Access

While it's still too early to tell if Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo! will go through (Yahoo! is still casting around for a white knight, Microsoft may not up its bid, and there's still regulators to convince), it could lead to some intriguing products in the collaboration, communication, and content space.

Yahoo! recently bought Zimbra (www.zimbra.com), a company that has created a really cool collaboration package. To quote Zimbra, "Ajax based web collaboration is at the heart of ZCS 5.0. The powerful web client integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, VoIP, and online document authoring into a rich browser-based interface. Also, our unique open source Zimlet technology makes it easy for you to include custom 'mash-ups' in the ZCS web client."

From what we've heard at Burton Group, Zimbra is very happy to be at Yahoo!, and continues to do its own thing while the higher ups debate Yahoo!'s longterm strategy. However, the vultures are already circling. They're claiming that given its druthers, Microsoft will shoot Zimbra if the Yahoo! deal goes through. I've seen several articles/blog posts to that effect, and at least one Zimbra competitor is claiming that. A fellow analyst sent me an e-mail from a PR person for Gordano that starts, "With the recent Microsoft/Yahoo! News [sic], Zimbra's users are definitely worried about the fate of their messaging systems and are looking for alternatives in case Microsoft kills a competitor to Exchange." (Surprise, surprise, the PR person recommends that those customers move to products from Gordano.)

I'm hoping Microsoft isn't that stupid. Rather than shooting Zimbra, Microsoft should embrace it. Zimbra, by rethinking what workers should be able to do while living in their office suite, has injected new life into mundane things like e-mail and calendars, and could do the same for Microsoft. I would love to see Microsoft come in and say, "You know, these folks are way ahead of where we are, and we should leapfrog to that position before Google or someone else does." Outlook Web Access, while a lot better than what it was several years ago, is still a second class usability citizen compared to the Outlook rich client. Microsoft could swap out Outlook Web Access, put Zimbra in its place, and have a state-of-the-art interface that would make both Outlook and Gmail look weak by comparison. I use Outlook Web Access a lot; a Zimbra interface would be a huge productivity improvement for me.

If Microsoft went the Zimbra route with OWA, Microsoft would then have to overhaul Outlook to keep up with the new standard it set. In this Web 2.0 world, e-mail and calendars are going to be a vendor battleground. I think Microsoft would do itself a favor by embracing a top class weapon: Zimbra.

Burton Group's Response to the ODF Alliance Posted

I've finished posting Burton Group's response to the ODF Alliance’s response to our “What’s Up .DOC?” overview report on ODF and OOXML on the CCS blog. It's in three parts:

• Part 1: Points 1-6
• Part 2: Points 7-12
• Part 3: Points 13-18

Including the ODF Alliance's comments for context, it's pretty long--20 pages in Microsoft Word--which is why I split it up into three parts.

I certainly picked up some interesting tidbits in the course of doing research for the replies. For example: Adobe's Buzzword word processor is supporting OOXML sooner than it's supporting ODF (point 18 in part 3); and ODF supports many more table columns in a word processing document than OOXML [8,192 in ODF, 63 in OOXML] (this is probably because ODF table support is universal across all three applications, including spreadsheets, while the OOXML word processing spec is built with Microsoft Word as the model; point 17 in part 3).

Happy reading!

Burton Group's Response to the ODF Alliance (Part 1)

What follows is Burton Group’s response to the ODF Alliance’s response to our “What’s Up .DOC?” overview report on ODF and OOXML. At the outset, we’d like to clarify some things before getting into the point-by-point responses: 

1. The utility of a model is assessed relative to stated objectives in a given domain; a modeling endeavor never has a simple right or wrong answer (page 18 of our overview). A key part of this debate is the subjective assessment of how important Office file format interoperability is—we believe it will be very important for most enterprises—and that Office file format interoperability was not a goal for the group that designed ODF.
2. Standards initiatives participants are often at least partly politically motivated, generally with significant business issues at stake. That’s certainly not new to the ODF/OOXML debate.
3. We reviewed the current versions of the published standards, so the intention to more completely integrate ODF with RDF in the future is not an immediate consideration for enterprises making format decisions today. Burton Group believes that ODF 1.2 is a much richer and useful specification than previous versions, and we will update the overview to reflect that when ODF 1.2 is approved. 

Responses to the ODF Alliance points follow. To keep this post from being horrendously long—and since we haven’t finished all the responses at this point—we’ll post them in series. This post covers points 1-6. To make it easier for readers, we’ve listed the ODF Alliance comments in italics, followed by the Burton Group replies in a non-italicized font. 

Microsoft Bidding for Yahoo!

Microsoft is bidding to acquire Yahoo! at $31 per share. The letter sent to Yahoo!'s Board of Directors in interesting in several ways from a collaboration/communication/content strategies point-of-view.

First, the letter notes, "...the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending." While mentioned within the context of online advertising, the consolidation of Yahoo!'s and Microsoft's datacenters would give Microsoft a huge backend for its ongoing push into software and services on the enterprise side.

Second, the letter says, "You should also be aware that we intend to offer significant retention packages to your engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines." One of the recent jewels that Yahoo! acquired is Zimbra, and if the Zimbra folks stayed around and allied with Microsoft's research into useability, Microsoft would gain a very interesting asset. Of course, given the Java and open source parts of Zimbra, Microsoft could shoot it as well, so who knows.

On a business note, a pattern seems to be emerging here. In the case of FAST Search, Microsoft had its eye on the company for awhile, but waited until a FAST execution/strategy stumble depressed the stock before bidding. I would contend the same happened here. It's classic Business 101, but it highlights the fact that timing is part of the equation.