Google Docs: An Enterprise Laggard
November 15, 2008
Forbes Magazine, the business publication with the editorial to ad ratios that made Bill Ziff giggle with glee, published “Study Finds Google Docs Struggles to Gain Foothold in Productivity Suite Market”. This is not really an Forbes story; it is a Forbes reprint of Business Wire news release. Nevertheless, you will want to take a quick look at the document here. I am learning to look closely at the urls and the disclaimers on some high profile Web sites. The content says “Forbes” but the information is often unusual. In September 2008 I was in the audience when a Googler reported strong uptake for Google Apps and Google Docs. I wrote about the New South Wales’s deal with Google for putting Google services in the hands of school children. I heard a rumor that on busy days, Google Apps was enjoying sign ups in the 3,000 every 24 hours. Google’s enterprise initiatives have been sufficiently robust to disrupt some enterprise search vendors and cause Microsoft to knee jerk its way into cloud services.
The news story reveals that:
Google Docs (a web-based application) was the 2nd most popular free productivity app, used by 1% of users. Google docs also had the lightest use of all productivity apps, with an average of 40 actions performed in the app (compare with 548 in OpenOffice and 1,797 in Microsoft Word), and the fewest average days used during the 6-month period.
I am not sure I follow the data but I think the GOOG is actually doing okay, not exactly what the headline and word “struggles” suggests. So who wrote this study? ClickStream Technologies. This is neither good nor bad in my opinion, but I have two questions: [a] Is Forbes endorsing this study or just earning some extra money recycling content? and [b] Why is this study negative towards Google? I don’t have answers to these questions. In our own work, we try to be clear, and I found the data in the story pretty confusing to an old goose like me.
Stephen Arnold, November 15, 2008
Comments
One Response to “Google Docs: An Enterprise Laggard”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] Google Docs: An Enterprise Laggard […]