Thinking Clearly .

We recently migrated to Google Apps for corporate “stuff”—in fact, we paid for the enterprise version, to get more mailbox space, better support, no targeted ads in Gmail, etc. It’s $50 per user per year and I can’t complain about that at all. (We might have gone with Zoho if I’d researched them a bit better: their offerings are much broader, but it’s hard to beat Google operationally, the recent Gmail outage notwithstanding.)

So, here are 3 reasons this switch has been a huge win for us so far:

1. Ubiquitous access

This one is painfully obvious, of course, but web apps make yr data available just about anywhere at any time, from just about any computer. This is such a big win that it alone more or less compensates for most warts and bugs in the rest of Google Apps suite. I can now leave my computer at work, walk home, jump on the computer there, and not miss a single beat.

Even better, now that Homeland Security has decided, unilaterally, that my laptop is fair game, I can just leave it at home and use a computer wherever I’m going. While this isn’t quite yet practical, things like Linux distros on USB keys certainly help.

2. Integration

I don’t really get to write much code any more, alas. Most of my time is spent talking to customers, potential customers, partners, potential partners, etc. Which means I live in email, calendar, and chat. Google Apps integration of the Big Three is pretty damn great. There are some warts in individual apps (GCal, for example, has some weird missing bits, like group calendars), but the integration between mail-calendar-chat is pretty awesome.

3. Reliability

Gmail just had an outage last week that pissed a bunch of people off. For us it simply amounted to about 90 minutes of downtime, which, frankly, I thought was a net positive. Everyone I know spends too much time gardening the Big Three, often to the detriment of getting stuff done. Sure, this is a bit of rationalization of a Google operations failure, but in the grand scheme of things it’s vastly less troubling than actually losing data.

I’ve said for many years that Google’s real secret sauce is their mastery of operational challenges. If that’s true, putting our biz data into Google Apps at least aligns our interests with my analysis of their superiority in running stuff well.

The single biggest factor that kept me from taking Zoho super seriously was the nagging question: is it remotely feasible that Zoho would run a better ship than Google? I couldn’t find any good reasons to prefer Zoho to Google in this regard. (I wonder, oh LazyWeb, if Zoho’s seemingly better integration than Google Apps, and my ranking integration higher than reliability here, means I screwed this one up?

Update: A nice Zoho person points out in a comment that they’re aware of this perception; that they have apps where Google doesn’t, which I will take a look at; and that some of their stuff integrates with Google Apps. Cool.

And some things we don’t like so far:

1. Missing integration bits

What’s missing? I want Google Reader made into a core Google App offering and I want it integrated with the Big Three. I trust this is on Google’s radar. I’d like some syntax to be able to quickly create GCal events from Google Talk. That would be a big win, including, by default, to invite everyone I’m chatting with—either single or group chat—to that event.

People live in chat and having to context switch to GCal isn’t ideal.

2. Code, programmer bits missing

This one is specific to us as makers of fine software products: where’s the Google Code integration with the rest of Google Apps? We use a 3rd party SVN host, but what I really want is Google Code to be integrated with the rest of Google Apps, so we can dump the 3rd party dependency.

I’d pay significantly per month for this integration with Google Code (which I otherwise am not hugely a fan of—Google should just integrate with Github!).

I want to be able to open and close tickets from Gmail or Google Talk. I want Guido’s Code Review tool made part of Google Code and integrated with the Big Three.

All of this is probably unlikely to happen since Code Shops are probably not on Google’s Apps radar, given that Google Code is pretty much entirely about their open source presence (which, at times, seems like bullying—I don’t care for Google’s anti-proliferation moves against minority free software
licenses). I’d love to be wrong about this, of course.

3. The wiki sucks rocks

Google Sites is a big steaming piece of crap. Seriously, WTF?! I want a wiki, with wiki syntax, not some WYSIWYG junk. Very disappointing. Of course this means that the Big Three (chat, email, calendar), which should be the Big Foure (Three plus Google Reader) is unlikely to become the Big Five (Four plus real wiki). But they really missed the boat here, since what you want in a Google Apps Wiki is more integration: with mail, chat, calendar, etc.

All things considered, however, we’re really happy with migration to Google Apps and looking forward to new-and-better.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under BizApps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.