Google guns for MS Office with billboard campaign

Google Apps is really not that great.

I wouldn't pay for it. I'd rather pay for MS Office or use open office.

Google Apps sharing feature is about the only good thing going for it.

Cloud == Fail

It is pretty obvious that cloud based versions of office apps are just silly and bound to fail in the grand scheme of things. Firstly, you have the obvious points about stability. When the cloud fails everyone in your company is unable to use the office apps. When things are locally installed, a failure only affects one person. And if that person has some urgent work to do they can kick someone else off a PC and do the work; or log in to their laptop; or one of a billion other options to deal with it. Secondly, you have the security issue, as we recently saw with some Web 2.0 twats. Getting onto a corporate LAN is usually tricky. By using SecureID tokens and the like, password guessing attacks are basically off the agenda. Hacking corporate LANs usually requires internal presence, or a lot of skill to get over the firewalls. Hacking corporate data stored in the cloud usually involves guessing a few passwords (which regardless of policy will always be easy). Thirdly, cloud apps will always have less rich features than locally installed equivalents. The user interface has less features, and you have to deal with network latency.

Of course, Google are only doing this for political reasons. They are trying to take the news agenda away from the Ya!Bing! deal.

@Jerome 0

I respectfully disagree with your view on this issue. While I'm not a marketing geek myself, I have seen enough statistics about the effects of advertising that I can offer an alternative opinion about Google's campaign. They are keeping their brand in front of the larger audience ( think "sheeple" here ) to maintain the perception ( maybe "revolutionary concept" fits better ) that there are CHOICES to be had in the computer arena.

Borrowing the penguin icon to signify my preference for having a choice.

Just wait...

I think Google are in danger of becoming viewed in the same way as Microsoft eventually (e.g. evil)

I agree with 4a$$Monkey - Google Apps just isn't that good and lacks the polish of MS Office.

Yes, I am a bit of a MS fanboy (I'm a .NET developer) but I do use Google instead of Live Search/Bing. I just think that Google should stick to what they do best before they are before the EU etc... etc...

"When the cloud fails"

"When the cloud fails everyone in your company is unable to use the office apps"

Whereas when the all eggs one basket corporate EMC NAS box fails, like it did here this morning for half an hour, everyone in the company is unable to use the office apps or any other apps, unless they've broken the rules and kept local copies of stuff they know they might want to work on.

I can't remember the last time external Internet access failed.

@ Anonymous Coward..

"Whereas when the all eggs one basket corporate EMC NAS box fails"

You mean you don't have a failover strategy for important data?

Yeah, I know, cost and budget. They're the things that hamstring us from having a perfect world (or at least a better world).

I'm personally a fan of keeping things in more than one place; distributed and heterogenous has the tendancy to be more resilient than monolithic and homogenous. A dual boot of your primary OS, and a secondary, with file formats in ODF where possible leaves you the option of keeping going and soldiering on through an awfull lot of dire scenarios. Yes, it means your users have a harder job of learning both OSs, but guess what? People learn; they're actually pretty good at it. And the first time something "dire" happens and they have something to fall back on, the smug looks they all have with their friends when they say "look what we did when it all went bad" is amazing.

Beer because I could use one about now.

StarOffice

Google need as a previous writer mentioned, a free version, say Open Office, whereas the rest of the business world require a supported version like StarOffice. Much cheaper & for most folks combines the security & integrity that Sun Microsystems affords as opposed to the security & integrity that M$ never offered.

For the rest of us Open Office & Google Apps are fine. For the business world, the supported versson of Google Apps is also fine. Anybody who really needs M$ is only serving M$ & paying for their pointless upgrades with the required extras added in; eg disaster updates. Thia allows for acceptable updating of a crappy product.

Get out of the loop, GET LINUX, GET UBUNTU, GET LINUX!