Continuous Innovation in the Online Office
April 27th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 5 Comments
When comparing online office applications such as Google Docs or Zoho with the desktop standard Microsoft Office (sorry, Open Office folks: I know you’re out there, but Microsoft still owns the market), Microsoft advocates usually point to the feature disparity between online and desktop applications. Sure, the online applications are great for light use, the comparison goes, but the desktop applications have so many more features that no serious user could possibly be happy working in the browser. You may not use more than 10% of the features in Microsoft Office, but if part of that 10% isn’t implemented in Google Docs, you won’t switch.
But there’s another factor involved in the comparison that often gets overlooked, even by advocates of the online office suites. Even if you agree that feature counts are a deciding point, and grant that the online office suites are far behind in sheer number of features, they’re ahead in an area that is psychologically quite powerful: perceived speed of development.To see what I mean, look at two lists:
Features shipped by Google Docs in March and April:
- Speaker notes for presentations
- Embedded YouTube videos in presentations
- Offline usage for documents
- Save as PowerPoint for presentations
- Support for 8 additional languages
- New toolbars and menus
- Embedded Google Gadgets
Features shipped by Microsoft Office in March and April:
Which company looks like it’s innovating faster? Which one has the appearance of being more responsive to user needs? Which one is giving you constant evidence that it’s shipping new features, as opposed to talking about new features for the future?
In the desktop world, Microsoft rolls out huge new versions once every two or three years, complete with multimillion dollar launch events, full-press marketing, and giant lists of new features. But in between, there’s that steady drumbeat of new stuff from the online competition. Every time Google or Zoho ship even a new tiny feature, they get press coverage. Every time, there’s another opportunity for people to think about whether they want to switch to a fast-moving free alternative. Every time, there’s renewed hope that development happening on internet time will deliver the features you need soon.
This easily-visible continuous innovation gives the online application suites a momentum that, coupled with the near-zero cost of entry and the benefits of near-universal access, should enable them to continue stealing customers away from the desktop. Every new feature makes the online alternatives “good enough” for a new class of users - but, more importantly, it gives hope to all other would-be switchers.
Are you already using an online office suite for all or part of your web work? If not, what are you waiting for?
5 Comments Post your own comment
Sridhar Vembu says: April 27th, 2008 10:20am
Mike,
This is an excellent point. The reason for this rapid evolution is the inherent productivity advantage enjoyed by producers in the SaaS model, which (as economics dictates) mostly accrues to the benefit of consumers. As a company that has done both traditional software-as-product and now software-as-a-service, I can testify to the huge productivity gains in the SaaS model.
I would take this a step forward, and confidently predict that within a relatively short period of time (perhaps 1 year, and definitely no more than 2) the online suites will catch up and exceed the functionality of their desktop counterparts. This is going to surprise most people.
Both Google & Zoho are moving at full-speed, even customers who don’t actually switch to online suites will gain, simply because Microsoft is going to be forced on the defensive with price-cutting to keep their installed base. But price-cutting alone won’t help Microsoft, because productivity differences cannot be compensated for by tactical pricing moves.
My post http://blogs.zoho.com/general/cloud-computing-switching-costs-software-prices/
may be relevant in this context.
Sridhar Vembu
Zoho
Vaibhav says: April 27th, 2008 12:02pm
Yes and No. It’s true what you say about how Google or Zoho can move very fast and offer new features rapidly.
However, MS Office doesn’t lag behind that much. Most of the features that MS Office lacks are in the area of being connected and collaborative over the Internet (I mean, editing-wise, as you said, Google Docs and Zoho are far behind). And this is where Office Live comes in:
http://www.onlineobservations.net/google-docs-vs-office-live-workspace/
With Live Office, MS can keep pace with a lot of the features that are offered by Zoho or Google Docs.
The only missing piece is the online editing (and I at least don’t mind having Office installed on my machine).
Scott says: April 27th, 2008 8:38pm
Another thing I’d like to see in these online apps is my ability to easily access my entire file system for backups and data portability.
If I could store my docs on a more accessible file system, I’d feel more comfortable. I’d love to be able to access my “gDrive” as a mapped drive and use a backup utility to copy the data to my own backup server. The master would still be on gDrive, but if needed, I’d have backups and I could move that information somewhere else.
Doing this also necessitates that data being stored in a portable, non-proprietary format. I can currently export a single Google Doc to Word or Open Office, but I can’t grab them all in mass and have them in a format I can open in another program. That’s a problem.
I want to feel that I have complete ownership of my data and that means having access to it in the same ways I have access to it using offline apps where I can back it up and feel safe that I’ll be able to open those files in 20 years.
For online to win, I think the online apps needs to just be another/better piece of software. It just happens to be online. However, the data we put there is completely separate from it and we (users) need to have 100% control over it whereby we could take it all with us in minutes.
Sorry that this topic is not completely on topic, but this issue never seems to get brought up and WWD seems like the type of place that might bring it into the discussion.
Mike Gunderloy says: April 28th, 2008 3:18am
Scott - we had some discussion early this year of the pitfalls of storing your documents in a single place online: http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/01/13/who-protects-your-cloud-data/ . My own view is that data portability between different “cloud” services is a huge issue (and a huge opportunity for vendors who get it right).
Sunil says: April 28th, 2008 10:41am
Very nice post.
Zoho very recently added macros and pivot tables to its online spreadsheet and its too before Google.
Here is mine post on this
http://feedshub.blogspot.com/2008/04/online-office-vs-offline-office-zoho.html