A decade ago, it was static pages with blinking and flashing. Now, most of the applications you use in Windows or Mac, you use in a browser. You can send email, write documents, edit photos, videos, and music online. There are two general buckets where current online applications fall into:
- Complete replacements
- Partial replacement
An example of a partial replacement is Adobe’s just announced, Photoshop Online. It’s a photo editing tool that you can use online. The reason why this is a partial replacement is because the desktop version is much more powerful and useful for it’s target users: professionals. Because of today’s bandwidth, only text based online applications have a potential be complete replacements.
An example of a complete replacement is Google Apps . Basically, Google hosts your email, calendar, contacts, documents, and spreadsheets. Both the administrative interface and user interface are one of the best in the industry. Google Apps would be a replacement for Microsoft’s Exchange platform. I recently attended Microsoft’s Ready for a New Day Launch Tour 2007. One of the main focuses of the event was their Exchange 2007 platform. They had a pamphlet that described a use case implementation of the platform. Man did it sound complicated.
If I owned a small, but growing business, it would be hard for me to justify investing human resources to implementing the Exchange platform when something like Google Apps existed. I would spend in business the way I spend in real life. I put money in the most important resources, and save on less important resources. For example, if I had a software company, I would rather higher two software developers than three system administrators. Google Apps Premium charges $50/user/year which is almost nothing compared to the thousands of dollars for the servers, licenses, and administrators for Exchange.
Google Apps is not a silver bullet. It may lack a lot of features that Exchange has, but it does get you 80% of the solution. A business owner would have to justify whether that last 20% is worth the huge incremental cost. Further, Google is hosting your data which may be a security risk to you. On the other hand, the business owner will have to implement her own system which will have its own security holes. Again, she’ll just have to weigh that risk.
Personally, if it was my business, I’d go with Google Apps. I absolutely hate Outlook and I wish Amazon would switch, but Amazon would switch all of its backend hosts to Windows before it would allow someone else to host its email.
At the launch event, I was prepared to ask the Google question and hear his pre-canned answer. Unfortunately, Bill Gates did not have a Q&A session. I don’t mean this to be a bash Microsoft post. I do not hate Microsoft. In fact, I think Vista is strong, and their .NET 3.0 framework is just as impressive. I just think that they should be more up front about its competitors and why they think their solution is better. After the Launch event, I wasn’t convinced.
