Google enters the office suite/email space officially

Read the articles here.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article1421520.ece

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1423608.ece

Here's the Google Apps site. http://www.google.com/a

Google will launch an assault on one of Microsoft’s biggest earners today when it unveils its first suite of paid-for office tools.

For $50 (£26) a year per user, Google Apps Premier Edition will offer corporate customers a bundle of web-based applications including e-mail, a word processor and a spreadsheet. It will compete with Microsoft’s Office, which includes the software stalwarts Word and Excel...

... Google added that its own 10,000 employees have been using its system for several months, although as recently as October most of them were using Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail service. Robert Whiteside, head of enterprise services at Google UK, said: “We have been eating our own dogfood.”

What makes this work, of course, is that Google has a kajillion units of storage space for rent,  and most people have high-speed. (My parents in Montana with their seeminly 1k dialup could no more use Google spreadsheets than they could pull bricks out of walls with their bare hands.)

There is also a wide-open space for just a freakin' simple application with fewer features but the right features. If I were a programmer, I would create a cut-down simpler version of OpenOffice.org. (I know I can modify the toolbars and menus, but you can't delete menus that are already there.)

I haven't checked out the new site yet, though I do use Google Spreadsheets to tracks lists of things I need to access from multiple locations.

Comments

[Jason]

I find that the sticky note plugin to the Google personalized home page takes care of my needs for holding links to stuff that I need to check out when I get home from work (either something that would take too much time to read then and there, or stuff that's just plain old NSFW). I usually only have 2 or 3 links and a mandatory note at the top that never changes, which reads "Drink more coffee". I'm sure your list is way too big for the space allotted though.

The collaboration feature of Google Docs is indispensable, to me, as a software contractor. Twice, now (100% of contracts since I started using docs), I've kept clients in the loop regarding how many hours I've been working on their project. Neither times they've had Google accounts, and it just works. In fact, I put in a message at the Google Group "Share your story":

http://groups.google.com/group/Share-Your-Story/browse_thread/thread/ca7b6ad0d6835131

my note about opening document attachments in Google Docs is no longer valid.

(sorry, don't know the markup for link, and html didn't work)

[Solveig Haugland]

Ah, collaboration. Of course. Yeah, emailing around one copy of a spreadsheet while updating the master...not as fun as it sounds. ;> The sticky sounds interesting too.

Thanks for the comments!

Solveig

[UninformedLuddite]

re: jason

I don't know if that's quite collaborative enough for me. Please tell me Google's Apps aren't that sad?