The recent Capgemini/Google joint announcement introducing Capgemini as the first real taker in the Google Apps Premiere Edition Professional Program strikes me as a bit of a premature move. A lot of analysis has already been written on the subject and there is already a supposed Microsoft response. What most of the analysis (and the supposed response) fail to comment on is the readiness of Software as a Service (SaaS) for real enterprises.
SaaS is essentially a new buzzword for the service provided by an Application Service Provider (ASP)—something that has been around for several years now. Because it is really just a fluffword the usage difference between ASP and SaaS will vary but for the sake of this discussion I will differentiate them by saying that an ASP Service is a legacy application that was shoehorned to be served over the Internet and a SaaS service is an application that was developed specifically to be served over the Internet. Because SaaS apps are built for the web they have a much better shot at surviving in enterprise environments because they do not usually suffer from the crippling deficiencies that plagued many ASP apps (slow, buggy performance; data getting accidentally mixed up on the hosted database server; and so on) that were caused by simply sticking a legacy application on a terminal server and letting the customers have at. The model is compelling, especially to IT professionals, but does it really do anything that people need? 数据挖掘研究院
The GAPE story is certainly compelling. If Google can deliver what they say they can they will have a very broad range of applications that people all over the world currently recognize and use. Many of the applications do not seem ready for prime time but I assume that Capgemini has extracted assurances that development on the key stuff (word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, mail, file collaboration, etc) will continue until they provide a good working set of the features found in Office. This offering is going to start slow but there is no reason to think that Capgemini hasn’t put some good long thought into this (if there is one thing they do consistently, it is think about stuff a lot).
And now the real point: Comments about how GAPE isn’t in a state to realistically compete with Office miss the point—today is not the day for Google to start that fight. Conversely the experts who try and defend Google point out how the press release claims that this is not a replacement for Office but a collaboration tool seem to be ignoring that some of the apps replicate basic functionality found in office and the press release itself states that Capgemini is targeting information workers who are not valued enough to receiver copies of Office.
Microsoft is missing the boat because the majority of offerings coming out of Redmond are firmly rooted in the Software as an Asset mind frame. A lot of organizations subscribe to this model completely and scrapping it is clearly off the table. It is important, though, for Microsoft to take a much more pro active approach to supporting SaaS providers to fragment that market segment so Google cannot jump in and create or buy ownership of it out of the gate and use that toehold to attack the Office user core.
Google is jumping the gun because a major partnership like this only brings attention to a piece of Google that Microsoft could effectively annihilate (Google Apps brings in less than 1% of the total revenue pie) if they believed Google really had some kind of strategic inroads to the Office holy land. If I ran Google I would have perfected the apps first and then went head first at the desktop productivity and collaboration market share without having to make apologies for the state of my offerings or having to pretend like I was trying to sell something for a purpose other than what it was created for. 数据挖掘实验室
