Google Goes After Microsoft With Software Suite Out Today
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By Jefferson Graham  Google is getting serious about taking on Microsoft.    Today, it introduces Google Apps Premium Edition, a software suite for companies that provides e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, word processing and spreadsheets. The cost is $50 per worker per year vs.
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Google is finalizing the integration of Docs & Spreadsheets to enhance its free services and software offerings.
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A major component of Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Application Lifecycle Management platform, Visual Studio 2005 Team System is today expected to reach beta.
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On Monday, I.T. services company Capgemini announced a new partnership designed to make Google Apps a more viable option for large enterprises. The partnership between the Paris-based consulting, technology, and outsourcing-services firm and the world&#39;s leading search engine could have implications for Microsoft and its Office suite.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. is hosting events for software developers in 10 cities around the world on Thursday, promoting the use of its tools and services to build Web-based applications. The events, which began in Sydney and will wrap up later Thursday in San Jose, California, were expected to attract around 5,000 developers, with many others tuning in online. The events provide further evidence of how far Google has come from being an Internet search company to offering software and services that compete increasingly with those of Microsoft Corp. In a series of presentations, engineers showed how developers can use APIs (application programming interfaces) for Google Maps, Google Checkout and other services to add functionality to Web sites or build new, mash-up applications. The company also unveiled new software, includingÂ a browser plug-in called Google Gears, for viewing Web applications offline, and the Google Mashup Editor, an "experimental tool" for creating user interfaces with AJAX. Gregory Renard, CTO of IT consulting company Wygwam , traveled from Brussels for the event near Bastille in Paris. He came to research whether he should start using Google's APIs for his work, which involves building proof-of-concept applications for businesses and government agencies. In a sense he is on the front line of Google's rivalry with Microsoft. Renard is a Microsoft Most Valued Professional, one of a group of hand-picked developers chosen for their deep knowledge of Microsoft products. Today he is undecided as to whether he prefers the Google tools to Microsoft's competing Windows Live APIs for Web-based applications. Google's roots are on the Web but Microsoft has much more experience building tools for developers, he said. "Google is a search company that wants to be a software company, and Microsoft is a software company that wants to be a search company," Renard said. In any case, he's glad that Google has emerged as a Microsoft competitor because it should ensure more innovation and lower prices, he said. One question he hoped to get answered Thursday was whether Google's APIs will remain free to use, which is important if he plans to use them for his clients. Yvon Cognard was there to learn more about the Google Maps API, which his company uses at its Web site Trivop.com , which bills itself as "the first video guide for hotels." He has already been using it for some time and called it "a very good tool," although Google could do better with its documentation, he said. Cyril Pierre de Geyer was trying to decide if his company, Anaska , which provides training in MySQL and PHP, should also offer training in Google APIs. Anaska uses Google Maps on its own Web site to show locations of its training centers, he said. Google has a good reputation with developers and contributes code to the open-source community, such as extensions for the MySQL database, de Geyer said. But he has also noticed a tendency by Google to monetize its services more aggressively than a few years ago, he said, by putting more ads on its search results pages, for example. For Google, the events should help to build a bigger developer community, which in turn should help promote paid services such as the professional edition of its online productivity applications. It should also mean more Web sites using Google services, which helps drive its advertising business. Company engineers sought to emphasize the collaborative role that developers can play with Google's APIs. "We need your creativity and your imagination to drive the development of these products," said Patrick Chanezon, evangelist for Google Checkout, at the start of the Paris meeting . The other events Thursday were being held in Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Madrid, London, and Hamburg, Germany.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Google will make applications like Gmail and Docs and Spreadsheets available offline, in a move that will challenge Microsoft.
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(InfoWorld) - CapgeminiÂ , a major global services provider, has just partnered with Google to enable large-scale adoption of the enterprise version of Google Apps. Capgemini will provide training, support, integration, and other services to large organizations that implement Google Apps Premier. Itâs a small but momentous event, signaling increasing enterprise interest in free Web-based apps that look and feel like Word, Excel, and other Microsoft Office software. Google Apps was added to the portfolio of products Capgemini supports because the company believes demand for SaaS (software-a-service) productivity suites will grow strongly in coming years. Steve JonesÂ , a CTO at Capgemini, is quick to note that Google Apps will not displace Office, but will fill two niches: enhancing the ability of knowledge workers to create documents collaboratively and bringing Office-like capabilities to workers who would not otherwise have them. Nonetheless, adoption is bound to increase. "I'd expect more and more IT services companies will offer that kind of help desk and support around the Google Apps Premier environment," says Rebecca WettemannÂ , an analyst with Nucleus ResearchÂ . "Now is the time to definitely have advanced technology folks and strategy people, the ones who look a year or two ahead, to look at this stuff and stay abreast of it, even if the time isn't yet right to purchase," says Burton Group analyst Guy CreeseÂ . "A huge mistake would be to look at the offerings today, say they're immature, and then not pay any attention." At this point, with viral adoption of Google Apps happening under ITâs radar, attention is already being paid by rank in file employees. And Google is far from the only provider. Several smaller vendors with strong offerings, including ZohoÂ  and ZimbraÂ , compete directly with Google Apps. Cisco Systems now offers its WebEx WebOffice Â platform for collaboration, while a number of applications in Salesforce.comâs AppExchange venture into desktop productivity territory Waiting for Redmondâs shoe to drop Conspicuous by its absence is Microsoft, which has been unable or unwilling to come out with a hosted suite comparable to Google Apps. Many wonder if Microsoft is having a hard time figuring out how to develop a hosted version of Office without cannibalizing its offline business. "A challenge for Microsoft is to figure out how to get people to buy the next version of Office if there is also an on-demand version," says Wettemann. Yet few doubt that Microsoft will eventually respond with a direct competitor to Google Apps and other similar suites. When it does, the effect on the market will likely be significant. "I think Microsoft needs to worry about it now because it takes a while to get right," Creese says. "In hosted office suites, it's going to take a while for companies to figure out how they want the thing to work." In defense of the current strategy, Microsoft officials have said that Office has steadily gained hosted service components for years, and that combining local PC software with services in the cloud is the right approach. Steve Ballmer elaborated on this point last May at the Software 2007 conference. Last week, Microsoft released a unified installer to help users download updates for its family of Windows Live hosted services. Yet those who have been waiting for Microsoft to make a power move found the announcement underwhelming and dismissed it as cosmetic. Not a desktop substitute While many organizations ponder SaaS productivity suites, thousands of others have already implemented them. Web-based suites save on hardware and on time and effort for software installation and maintenance. They also make it easy for employees to share and collaborate on documents for a fraction of the cost it would take to implement an in-house messaging and collaboration system such as Microsoft SharePoint or IBM's Lotus Domino/Notes. Disadvantages include security concerns over hosting sensitive data with a third-party outside the corporate firewall, as well as downtime incidents that leave the organization without access. Upon close inspection, exiting SaaS suites reveal themselves as strong in certain areas and weak in others. In a recently published and widely discussed 55-page report, Creese took a microscope to Google Apps Premier, dissecting its pros and cons in detail. For example, Creese found the suite lacking in archiving features, such as records management and electronic discovery, as well as in analytics capabilities, such as analysis of content creation patterns. Google responded with a statement saying that the suite gives organizations "a new set of choices, many of which will complement and extend the power of the desktop, enhance group productivity and improve collaboration." Indeed, after weighing the pros and cons of SaaS suites, most analysts, users and vendors generally agree that these will not eliminate the need for packaged software suites. Because each model has its advantages, they work best in tandem, complementing each other. "We'll see more and more organizations that look to a tiered strategy for the way they deliver desktop applications. So rather than have a standard desktop, I may give Office to the folks in finance who really need Excel, while the folks in marketing may be fine within the Google environment," Wettemann says. The network effect At Adison & PartnersÂ , an executive recruitment consultancy, adopting Cisco's WebOffice has had a major positive effect, says Managing Partner Jim DiPietropoloÂ . The 8-person company has been office-less for the past several months, awaiting the completion of its new digs, which got delayed. With people working from home, having documents and calendars stored centrally in WebOffice servers has prevented the workflow from getting disjointed. "It ties everyone together," he says. Beyond helping with this temporary issue, WebOffice lets DiPietropolo and his employees be nimble in responding to client queries and requests while out of the office, by tapping remotely into databases and getting information on the fly. "From a business development standpoint, this has been a differentiator for us," he says. "This ability to instantaneously respond [to queries] really impresses clients." The significance of the Capgemini announcement, however, is that desktop SaaS solutions are moving upscale, from small businesses like Adison & Partners to global corporations â where dispersed knowledge workers are warming to the idea of collaborating on the same document in real time. âHaving a single version of the truth changes the business process,â says Capgeminiâs Jones, who notes that the e-mail round-robin that occurs in conventional document collaborations is eliminated. âReally, what weâre talking about is bringing software-as-a-service innovation to the desktop,â says Jones. âThe main way that people interact with a corporation is through the desktop. We are delivering software-as-a-service solutions into that market.â
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Internet titan Google began selling an online suite of business software in a new challenge to software powerhouse Microsoft.
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With the announcement of its new search engine, Microsoft is all geared to spoil the search engine party of Google and Yahoo. The software giant today released a beta version of its new MSN search service, claiming
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Not great software, but certainly good enough Comment Google is now head-to-head with Microsoft in the Office Apps market, as you may have guessed from the recent Google Apps announcement. What you get from Google is word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, chat, web page creation, and email.â¦
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As announced earlier, Microsoft today released the second beta of their upcoming Search Engine, which would replace the current version running on MSN website.
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The company will fight the order to reveal its software code to rivals. Also: Startup wants Google to feel outdated & hellip;. Sony plasters Europe with Walkmans & hellip;. and more.
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Software giant, Microsoft Corp., has decided to release beta versions of its updated MSN search engine earlier today. The company hopes to compete against leading search engines such as Google and Yahoo by
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InfoWorld - Google pushed further into the communication and collaboration applications market with a major upgrade Thursday of Google Apps, a hosted suite for organizations of all sizes that analysts say could soon become a real competitor to Microsoft Office.
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Google Inc. has formed a partnership with Capgemini SA, which will provide IT services to large businesses that adopt the Google Apps Premier Edition hosted suite of collaboration and communication software.
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Google will unveil communications and productivity software aimed at businesses that will be accessible over the Internet.
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While senior Microsoft executives pit the company against Google in a looming Internet search war, the Redmond, Washington-based company has begun offering a Google search tool for download from the Microsoft.