Microsoft attacks Google Apps with “Google Tax” claim | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft attacks Google Apps with “Google Tax” claim

winrumors.com

20 pointsrbanffy22 comments

Microsoft probably has a good chance of winning this war, when you look at the amount of people who are completely unwilling to stop using Office in favor of docs for whatever reason. I know so many people like that.

Me, I stopped using Office over a year ago now. Pure google docs and that's it. I miss nothing.

Google Apps is a disruptive technology in the sense described in the book "The Innovator's Dilemma." Microsoft might not effectively complete with the disruption because Microsoft does not recognize the disruption, Microsoft continues to focus on maximizing profits in their current ecosystem or other reasons discussed in the book. Google Apps is capturing early adopters like you and it continues to improve. Microsoft might not win.

Microsoft does not recognize the disruption?

You obviously haven't heard of Office 365: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/office365/small-business/abou...

I don't work for Microsoft but they have a lot of open positions for the Office 365 team which typically means they're investing heavily into it.

They most definitely recognize that they need to catch up. And very likely will.

I am aware of Office 365. Microsoft also invested heavily in the earlier NetDocs project, but that project was canceled.

I am sure that there are many people at Microsoft are aware of the disruption, but it's not clear to me that Microsoft as an organization has internalized it and is acting on it. For example, what is the product that Microsoft is selling? Are they selling a service to users or eye balls to advertisers?

For those in the know, MS has already established its online "track record". It has launched numerous "ground breaking" products, with strong initial promotion (well, marketing, at least), only to kill them off 1 - 3 years later when they weren't happy with adoption.

Not that Google and others haven't also done this, upon occasion. But, by contrast, MS has almost no track record of success (Hotmail, they bought -- and still almost/partially fucked up.)

At this point, I simply will not trust anything "online" from MS.

Likewise, anything they "share". When you get into trying to actually use it, inevitably you're sucked into a commercial relationship before it becomes useful. Or, you were. I guess some people are using the recent Express editions of their developer tools with some success. I'd already given up.

I don't mind their making a buck. I do mind what I perceive as their disingenuity.

You (and Microsoft) do have a point. Moving from Office to Google Docs really isn't that big of a deal for people that read Hacker News. The bulk of the workforces that use Office are not like that: they're button pushers. As a developer I have seen people completely thrown into chaos just because I moved some interface elements around on a webpage because I felt it was more intuitive.

Microsoft has had a few years to get everyone used to their new ribbon layout. Now all they need to do is properly transition that to their online offering and keep pricing in line with Google and I don't particularly like Google's chances in the enterprise market on the office software front.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Microsoft-Exchange-Server-2...

$67.99 per person -- plus the cost of the software itself,and the hardware to run it on, and the IT people to deploy/maintain it.

Google Apps professional, you know the one that makes sure you don't see random 404s on Spreadsheets and have no one to talk to one fine morning, that costs $50/yr per license.

Not having Google datamine your business records, Priceless.

Citation?

Google Apps terms of service: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/standard_terms.html

See section on confidential information.

Note the differences between the free version and commercial version: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html

See also 1 & 2 of Google's privacy policy here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/

er, can you point to the actual datamining part? I'm not seeing it. I see

"The Recipient will only have a duty to protect Confidential Information disclosed to it by the Discloser: (1) if it is clearly and conspicuously marked as “confidential” or with a similar designation; (2) if it is identified by the Discloser as confidential and/or proprietary before, during, or promptly after presentation or communication; or (3) if it is disclosed in a manner in which the Discloser reasonably communicated, or the Recipient should reasonably have understood under the circumstances that the disclosure should be treated as confidential, whether or not the specific designation “confidential” or any similar designation is used."

and

"Recipient may disclose Confidential Information solely as needed to comply with a court order, subpoena, or other government demand (provided that Recipient first used all commercially reasonable efforts to notify Discloser and to give Discloser the opportunity to challenge such court order, subpoena, or government demand except in situations where Recipient is prevented, per lawful government request, from disclosing the existence of the court order, subpoena, or other government demand)."

and

"Each party acknowledges that damages for improper disclosure of Confidential Information may be irreparable; therefore, the injured party is entitled to seek equitable relief, including temporary restraining order(s) or preliminary or permanent injunction, in addition to all other remedies, for any violation or threatened violation of this Section 8. A Recipient shall have a duty to protect Confidential Information during the term of this Agreement and for a period of five (5) years thereafter."

How many gmail users would you estimate actually identify each of their emails as confidential? Or docs users?

I suspect it is a very low percentage and in contrast the paid version requires Google to treat the customer's documents as if they were Google's own.

Microsoft's hosted Sharepoint services probably have the same policy.

Google Docs is extremely frustrating. It has such potential, but it's such a hack-job, and Google doesn't seem particularly interested in making it less so. It certainly shows that the apps were acquired and patched together, because document organization is putrid, and even search doesn't work effectively.

Yep, it was much more attractive when it was a bunch of quaint little silos, which happened to usually respect my SSO cookie. But now, "managing" all my domain apps under one roof, well, is nasty.

“The three general areas where organizations feel the Google Tax most strongly are deployment, IT support costs and user training,”

Could someone explain how #1 and #2 applies to Docs?

Importing a list of users to Google. Adding bookmarks and desktop shortcut icons to each user's desktop. Telling the user to use their web browser instead of Word.

These are pretty much the same costs as transitioning to any new software, though. I consider myself a pretty experienced computer user, but after Microsoft made the Office 2007 change (with the "ribbon" instead of menus and toolbars), I was lost. Obviously I was able to find help on my own and RTFM, but this is not a skill most people using Word have. So switching from Office 2005 to Office 2007 was probably just as expensive as switching from Office to Google.

Interesting how Microsoft doesn't point that out.

I agree, that is the cost of changing software, it's disingenuous to call it a Google Tax.

Yes, certainly it's disingenuous, but it also reinforces the theory that anyone spouting an "X tax" line is biased anti-X. It's a nice leading indicator.

It's been a long time coming but it finally seems like Google Apps is making Microsoft sweat a little, if these petty comments are anything to go by.

Seeing how bad a job Google recently did porting my GHD/GAYD account to their consolidated account type, past account errors[1], retraining issues, possible privacy issues, and given occasional Google Docs errors[2], I would avoid depending on Google Docs at a large company.

[1] A few years ago, Google moved all my Google Reader RSS feeds from my Google Hosted address to the GMail address I use for logging in to YouTube.

[2] Sometimes a spreadsheet will take a long time to finish loading, or won't finish loading, or after making edits it will fail to save. It's very rare, but deeply irritating. Excel or Word may take a long time to load, but for me they've never failed to load, and once running they're pretty snappy.

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