Pattern Finder

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.”

Adobe Buys Omniture: The Long View

Image via Wikipedia

On September 15, Adobe announced that it was buying web analytics vendor Omniture. This solves some short-term issues for both companies. Adobe’s revenue is down, and Omniture’s annual revenue of $300+ million will bolster that; Omniture wants to call higher and leverage Adobe’s many offices as a way to increase sales.

The financial analysts were all aflutter over the short term implications. Some weren’t quite sure where the synergy was (“OK, explain to me how a company that sells Dreamweaver needs web analytics.”); others felt Adobe paid too much (I’m inclined to agree, but knowing Josh James, I’m not surprised he got a good price); and others said Microsoft, Oracle, and others might top Adobe’s offer.

However, assuming the deal goes through—and I think it will—what does this mean in the long term? It means that we’re finally starting to see some market movement towards content analytics: that is, creating a feedback loop that monitors content creation and consumption as a way to help enterprises create more relevant content at a lower cost.

I discussed this concept in a Burton Group report three years ago: Content Analytics: Assessing the Value of Corporate Content (Burton Group subscription required). In the analyst call announcing the planned acquisition, Adobe said their customers were telling them that while they could monitor what parts of a web site or Flash application users were clicking on, they needed this analytics capability to be better integrated with the content creation process. Customers, Adobe, and Omniture typically discuss this integration work within the context of web site content—not surprising, since both Adobe and Omniture focus on this area.

However, there’s nothing to say that this integration work couldn’t expand to other areas, such as Adobe’s SaaS solution (Acrobat.com), digital images, documents. And in fact, in a call I had last week with Adobe and Omniture last week on the acquisition, they said as much to me. Both companies have a much broader vision of where this will ultimately go than was apparent in last week’s news coverage. This is the real long term value of this deal—expanding the creation/analytics integration work so that all digital content types are instrumented and monitored as a way to deliver the most relevant documents at the lowest cost. Put another way, in the long run, Adobe could use real data to tell you whether it’s worth spending three hours honing this project report—or whether you should spend only  20 minutes on it so you can move on to other work that will have a better payoff. That’s the path that Adobe is starting down, and that’s a good thing for enterprises.