Love the Google Apps Skeptics
I love all the Google Apps skeptics here on this site, as well as here and here. As most readers of this site will know, I'm no tireless Google booster, having criticized the company many times, but I do believe that Google Apps, whlle far from perfect (which is meaningless anyway) is aimed at one of Microsoft's juicier and softer flanks.Let's be clear: There is a very large group of people out there who need basic apps/sharing/scheduling/email, don't want to have IT support, and are stone-petrified at the idea of installing Exchange. Those people are not the Excel macro-using, Exchange-expert-paying, Fortune 500s. Matter of fact, most of the latter group will predictably sniff at Google Apps as a mere toy, useless for real world work.
Absolutely. Stay away. Far away. We can all just watch from a distance as, Christensen-style, the toy-like G Apps chews steadily away at tiny, but growing pieces of MSFT's hide.
[Update] The most cogent criticisms of Google Apps come from David Card over at JupiterResearch. His twin beefs:
- It's not ad-supported, which breaks Google's best marketing message
- Developers have to pay for API access, which is dumb
