Google's offline apps do not threaten Microsoft Office: Analyst
The launch of Google Gears, which is likely to mean the search giant's word processing, spreadsheet and calendar applications will soon work offline, is unlikely to dent the market share of Microsoft's Office productivity suite, according to an analyst from IBRS.
Joseph Sweeney, an advisor at the Sydney-based analyst firm, told ZDNet Australia that Google Gears will likely have a more significant impact when it comes to building collaboration features into future projects.
"If you look at the history of applications, when an application dominates the market, nobody moves away from it -- even if there is another cheaper alternative. If that was the case, we would have moved away from Microsoft Office a long time ago because there is a number of low-cost and freeware alternatives," said Sweeney.
Sweeney gave the example of Wordstar, which was one of the most popular word processing applications available, until WordPerfect arrived on the scene. According to Sweeney, people do not migrate to another product because of a new feature -- instead they wait until there is a compelling concept to take advantage of.
"Wordstar 3.3 was a command-based system but it died out when Wordperfect came through -- and although it still had the coding sequence, it enabled you do it in a more friendly way by hiding the codes and concentrating on the document," said Sweeney.
Collaboration: more than a combination of e-mail and calendar?
However, Sweeney believes that Gears could damage Microsoft by enticing developers to create software that will make Google more attractive when looking at future collaboration projects.
"Like it or not, the MS development framework is robust, well known and has tens of millions of people working on it. Increasingly, [Microsoft] has been making it cross platform -- not so much in terms of open source but in the context of people taking it to a mobile environment, and using it in all types of devices.
"Silverlight definitely took that .NET framework into a Web-type environment. Then Google comes along and says 'Hey guys, use this for development instead'. If people start building interesting collaborative features into those word processors, spreadsheets and calendars, that will certainly give Google an advantage," said Sweeney.
Today's announcement means administrators should seriously consider how collaboration is going to feature in future projects, said Sweeney, who points out that now they have a choice between what he calls ad-hoc collaboration, as offered by open-source firms such as Google and Mozilla, and more structured collaboration relating directly to the Office suite, from Microsoft.
"Collaboration is one of those words that has come to mean everything. Google and Mozilla and other open-source players have been focusing on what I call ad-hoc collaboration -- very unstructured and very few formal processes behind that.
"Microsoft on the other side has purchased Groove, an ad-hoc collaboration platform. But essentially they are building into Office quite structured collaboration tools," said Sweeney.
Administrators need to decide on a strategy for collaboration in the near future, according to Sweeney, who believes that Google Gears and Microsoft's Silverlight launch earlier this year "are the two most significant, important, technological announcements to come out in the past two years".
In a recent video interview with ZDNet Australia, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker said that collaboration was much more than simply unifying e-mail and calendar functionality.
"I don't think you should let a word or concept as important as collaboration be defined by Microsoft to mean calendar and e-mail integration. Collaboration, especially for millions of people on the Web, is about many other things," said Baker.