Google Hopes to Nab 90 Percent of Microsoft Office Clients
Google has big plans for 2013 — taking away 90 percent of Microsoft’s Office clientel.
Google VP and head of the company’s enterprise unit Amit Singh told
AllThingsD the technology giant’s “goal is to get to the 90 percent of
users who don’t need to have the most advanced features of Office.”
Google has put its focus on enterprise in 2012: its Compute Engine
competes with Microsoft Azure, Google Drive allows Google App users to
store documents “in the cloud” and the company is now charging customers
to use Google Apps.
Businesses of all sizes wishing to sign up for Google Apps now have
to shell out $50 a year. The change, Google said, is because its basic
app, used by millions of businesses, is no longer meeting the needs of
its users.
Companies of all sizes now must sign up for the premium version:
Google Apps for Business. This app includes round-the-clock phone
support for any issue, a 25GB inbox and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee
with no scheduled downtime. The app has an annual fee of $50 per user.
Some of Google’s biggest customers include Costco, Dillards, Kohl’s and Office Depot.
All of these changes, Singh says, have caused other large companies
to take notice of “what they can build using Google’s scale.”
“And we launched the next generation of Chromebooks. Each of the
things we’ve done, the investments we’ve made have given people reasons
to take a serious look at us in a ways they might not have done before.”
These changes, Singh says, will also enable the firm to control the enterprise market by pilfering Office users from Microsoft.
“We know the gaps between our features and theirs. We’re improving them week-by-week. We’re going to get to the 90 percent.”
Google Sheets, for instance, does tables graphing, etc., out of the box.
“In Q3, if you import from Excel into Sheets, you won’t be able to
tell the difference in Sheets,” Singh says. “The next thing is the
import from PowerPoint to Slides. That’s where QuickOffice is going to
help us a lot.”
Singh says Google has Android developers working on Enterprise applications.
“The Android ecosystem for Enterprise is getting better, now that
we’ve added things like encryption, and the same is happening on
Chrome,” he tells AllThingsD. “As Google Apps gets wider and stronger,
the ecosystem is getting strong, as people want to extend its
capabilitles.
“There’s Backupify; there’s Cloud Log for audits. There’s Smartsheet.
We’re seeing the natural evolution, but you can expect us to spend more
time cultivating that in the coming year. There’s also a strong
ecosystem around implementation and support of Google Apps. We’ve gone
from 3,000 partners to 6,000 in one year. So now there’s this massive
distribution.”
