Google Apps: The Microsoft View
December 17, 2009
Navigate to “The Grill: Microsoft’s Chris Capossela on Google, Twitter and that Blue Screen of Death.” One of the questions threw me; for example, “How similar was working at a restaurant with working at Microsoft?” Okay. For me the most interesting passage was:
Google seems to be doing Google Docs in part just to hurt your revenue. It is making some enterprises reassess the value they are getting from Office, especially if they don’t do any customizations or line-of-business apps. How do you convince CIOs there is value there?
Take a people process like an annual performance review. They are usually written in Word, but the end result goes off in some HR system like PeopleSoft or SAP. Budgeting is another very horizontal process. Most companies feel a lot of pain around the workflow and approval processes. They would love for Office to be more seamlessly integrated into their PeopleSoft system or SAP systems. Another good example is Accenture. They’ve written a lot of apps around making SharePoint the Facebook of their company. Traditional skills repositories, where people are supposed to update their skills into a line-of-business app, often struggle despite their over-designed back-end because it’s not a part of anyone’s daily process. With SharePoint, their consultants can articulate what they’re working on in a more unstructured way. The People Search in SharePoint becomes their expertise finder. It feels like a real social networking tool.
Interesting to me.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 17, 2009
I wish to disclose to the General Services Administration that this is an uncompensated post. (As well it should be.)
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