For productivity tools, Microsoft still reigns

I am reading this interesting discussion about Google Apps versus Microsoft Office and I cannot agree more with Karim´s comments, for productivity tools, today there is no real competition to Microsoft Office and its suite of products. Reading this comes at an interesting weekend when my company is finally moving to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook for email and calendar after suffering the lack of it for almost two years that I have been here. The argument for not using it before was mainly price since we were using some open source alternatives and some software we got for free from Oracle for the calendar app (highly not recommendable). If you look at Karim´s comment, the part that I find more interesting besides the laundry list of basic features missing in Google Apps is this one:

"$120 / 3 computers = $40 per computer. Assuming you upgrade every 3 years, that's about $1.12 per PC per month for the MS Office suite. Why would I spend THAT kind of crazy money for software I use day-in, day-out when I can bang my head "for free" against the lame "experimental" features of Google Docs?"

Companies focused on efficiency and cost reduction tend to make the basic mistake of not looking at the total cost of ownership of things and only look at the direct cost of something. I am all for using free or open source software but only if its better than existing alternatives not just because is free. In the case of using Google Apps (or the situation we had in the company till recently), I am sure that the loss of productivity is much higher than the actual cost of the software by far. I have wasted a lot of company money (meaning my work time lost because of issues with the email and calendar software we were using) that is far more expensive that the few dollars per day that will cost us from now on moving to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

And Bernard argument about collaboration is wrong, Microsoft has a great collaboration tool, Share Point and any serious analysis of MS Office versus Google Apps should have included it.

 

CD

 

 

Technorati tags: microsoft google office productivty

Comments

[Santiago]

This remember me the old discussion emacs vs vi. I’m just wondering if the companies that take such a decision have indeed performed the business case analysis or just happened that the current boss love one productivity tool or the other one. And I’ve to reckon that I’ve always preferred the big emacs though sometimes I have sometimes had to use vi for some productivity tasks.

[Casey Margell]

I completely agree with you with regards to an office environment and the use of Microsoft products. That said I've used some of the Google Apps stuff with a lot of success for sharing files among a group of people (friends, family, etc...) where setting (and hosting for that matter) a Sharepoint site is far more work than it's worth.

[Martin Geddes]

We use Office and Docs internally. Docs serves a different need -- collaborative editing, often of very short-lived documents and work-in-progress, and sharing across organisational boundaries. In telcospeak, I find myself using email as the "signalling plane" and Docs as the "media plane".

Oh, and vi vs emacs? I have to confess to being a fan of the latter :)

[Juan Infante]

No discussion about the need to consider total cost of ownership when planning to deploy a new system-based solution. But it is not that easy to fully estimate TCO, and usually the first (only) version of TCO is direct cost plus maintenance fee (eventually over one o two years). Of course, this is not enough.

Full TCO calculation has to take into account why a company decides to go to (or to migrate to) a system-based solution and what are the full deployment costs (not only pure installation, but also on-the-job/off-the job training, potential loss of productivity during start-up, …)

The detail of the deployment costs is very dependant on the cultural gap between the new solution and the old one. That is one of the reasons why Microsoft Office Suite reigns. Everybody knows how to write a paper using word (even my 9 years old daughter has learned how to do it at the school!).

I would change your entry title. Microsoft reigns, but only in well known desktop productivity tools, like Microsoft Office suite. For me is important to consider as different things desktop productivity tools and “beyond-desktop” productivity tools. Mail and agenda support are “beyond-desktop” productivity tools, and specifically in this area I do not think that Microsoft Exchange reigns.

And before deciding Microsoft to reign in your company for “beyond-desktop” productivity tools, you should also consider strategic costs: those related to setting up Microsoft as your partner. An example: if you decide today to set up Microsoft Exchange/Outlook as your mail solution, maybe tomorrow you will not be able to set up a collaboration solution other than Shared Point, at a reasonable cost. No matter whether Shared Point is a nice tool or not.

[cloning vhs tapes]

This strip reminded me of my Cryptology class for which I was the TA with an enrollment of 70 students. Weekly assignments were horrible as I spent more time grading them than the students may have spent on searching for the solutions. Exams were the worst with me having to evaluate their solutions to award partial points. It feel so good to see the right answers but these partial points we a killer. One had to go through all the steps and spot the error and then award some points for the number of correct steps.

[Jeff Paul Internet Business]

I find internet marketing the same as marketing a product in the real world. In real marketing one really has to go through different means to promote a brand and product. Same tasks are applied in internet marketing but this can also be done at the comfort of one’s bedroom.