Google Apps Making Inroads Against Microsoft Office, Gartner Says, Kurt Mackie is online news editor for the 1105 Enterprise Computing Group.
Microsoft Office's reign as the dominant productivity suite is under threat from Google Apps, according to analyst and consulting firm Gartner.Gartner's conclusion in its webinar Tuesday, titled "Choosing a Cloud-Based Office System: Google vs. Microsoft," was somewhat different than in the past. The firm used narrower criteria in its analysis, defining the two products as "cloud-based office" applications, where the minimal definition of that phrase included products offering e-mail plus text-processor capabilities. Also, the analysis based its assumptions on excluding some growth areas, such as China and India.
Under this framework, Gartner found that Google's cloud-based productivity suite is gaining on Microsoft's market share. In terms of user numbers, Google Apps had about 10 percent of the cloud-office market in 2007, 20 percent in 2009, and between 33 percent and 50 percent in 2012, according to Gartner's analysis.
Those findings appear to be a surprise, even for Gartner. "We didn't anticipate how well Google would do," admitted Tom Austin, vice president at Gartner and a Gartner Fellow, during the webinar.
Gartner is anticipating that greater office productivity suite growth will occur on the cloud side, rather than the customer-premises side, in the near future. In 2013, Gartner expects there will be 630 million office suite business users, with 50 million of them using a cloud-based product. By 2022, there will be 1.2 billion office suite business users, with 695 million of them tapping the cloud.
Microsoft Office currently predominates in terms of on-premises use, with about 80 percent to 96 percent user share, according to Gartner. Some of Microsoft's strengths with Office include meeting business needs and offering a predictable refresh cycle for IT pros. The company also has marketed its cloud-based Office 365 productivity suite along the same lines as its premises-based Office 2013.
On top of that, Microsoft offers hybrid deployment options for Office. The productivity suite represents the main chunk of Microsoft's revenue. The single most profitable division at Microsoft is the Business Division, where 80 percent of its revenue comes from Microsoft Office, Austin said.
Austin said that Google Docs will not become Microsoft Office. Google apps provide "just good enough" capabilities. On the plus side, they aren't bogged down with all of the features in Microsoft Office.
Google Apps are oriented toward consumers and "they haven't reconciled in behaving in certain ways for the enterprise," Austin said. Still, the enterprises that have successfully used Google Apps have tended to accept using them on Google's terms, he added.
Google Apps are better suited for heterogeneous environments, while Microsoft Office is "wed to Windows," Austin explained.
Google Apps Making Inroads Against Microsoft Office, Gartner Says -- Redmond Channel Partner
