Gartner has produced a paper on how enterprises should look at the Microsoft Office vs Google “Office” discussion. “
… With the Tonic Systems acquisition, Google continues to widen its offerings into a full collaboration suite. Adding presentation features takes it closer to competing with Microsoft Office. ..
Their advise to enterprises contains no surprises yet:
… Don’t plan on swapping out Microsoft Office for Google’s offerings anytime soon. Google will not replace Microsoft as the dominant enterprise office-suite provider within the next five years, at least. But it will challenge Microsoft and gain ground in specific situations. …
What I don’t quite get in these type of ‘forward looking statements’ is that they always seem to anticipate lot’s of activities on ’the underdog’s’ side and somehow expect Microsoft to sit still for the next five years. Although I am not from Microsoft’s forward lookiong statement department I’d say “expect things to happen” …
Michael Galore of Wired Magazine actually did a month long web-based apps only test. Read all about it in his article :
I wanted to test Google Apps‘ viability as an office suite, but also to see how close we are to tomorrow’s promise of the web-based desktop. The proliferation of web-based office suites from companies like Zoho, ThinkFree and Google have set wide-eyed technological optimists — myself included — raving breathlessly about the web workplace of the future. But the only way to see if this dream is close to reality was to put my data where my mouth is and take the plunge.
In general, I found that the browser is perfectly suitable for a variety of daily office tasks — e-mail, writing and editing stories. I also lived through several technological breakdowns that had me pounding my desk in frustration, wondering what the hell I had gotten into.
Livin’ la Vida Google: A Month-Long Dive Into Web-Based Apps
