So, Google today announced its Google Apps Premier Edition. It’s basically an integrated suite of applications for businesses and with this product, Google is competing directly with Microsoft’s Office and Outlook. A standard edition of Google Apps has been available for a while now, and has included Gmail, a web-based calendar, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Docs, among other things. The beefed-up premier edition offers enhancements like telephone support and 10Gb of storage space per user, all for just $50 per user per year.
Back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I remember when many people believed that Microsoft’s undoing would come from Java. The idea was that Java-based applications (like a wordprocessor or spreadsheet app) that could be downloaded through a web browser, would render Microsoft Office obsolete. Why would you need to buy a license and install Microsoft Office on your expensive fat client PC when you could just buy a stripped down thin client and run all your applications as Java applets that you download using a web browser? Of course, that never happened. Java applets were huge, took a long time to download (especially at the connection speeds of the time) and run, and were often buggy.
The difference today is that truly web-based applications, using Ajax or simply Javascript, are efficient, effective, centralized, and user-friendly. Google Apps Premier Edition may not replace Microsoft’s products in the next few months or even in the next couple of years. But it is definitely a step in the right direction, especially for small and medium businesses. Microsoft knows this and they have repeatedly said that they are moving on a web-based model as well, though probably not as quickly as companies like Google and Zoho (who must be feeling very nervous today after Google’s announcement). Who will win this next battle of the productivity software remains to be seen.
