InfoWorld has an article about a study by a consulting firm that says Google Apps isn’t the right move for any sort of decent sized mature business, that it better fits smaller businesses with very limited needs. Bad enough to have in the press, no doubt, but then there’s this:
Even at Google’s offices, Apps is used internally only as a collaboration add-on to Microsoft Office, the report says.
It never sounds good when your employees are using your competitor’s product, not your own, because your product has a number of glaring limitations that limit its use in major corporations. How can Google expect any business even a tenth the size of Google to use Google Apps or Google Docs if they don’t use it themselves?
Some of the limitations the report lists:
– Documents: “Google Docs does not support a table of contents, headers, footers, automatic creation of footnotes or end notes.”
– Spreadsheets: “Google Spreadsheets does not support some of the more esoteric functions within formulas (e.g., database functions), and cannot hide rows or columns.”
– Presentations: “Google does not yet offer a presentation application, although it is in the process of developing one.”
– Customized applications: “Using Visual Studio Tools for Office, developers can create customized business applications that leverage capabilities in Microsoft Word and Excel, for example. While the Google APIs offer some programmatic control, they do not offer the broad level of capabilities that Microsoft does.”
Ah, Google Presentations. That reminds me…
(via Bink)
