What's Holding Back Google Apps?

&#62; Google Apps, on the other hand, store data on Google's servers. "That's probably our biggest stumbling block to going bigger with Google," Simpson says.<p>This is a huge problem for many companies. Some documents you really don't care if Google stores or not.<p>However our compliance officer told us that we can't by law store rough drafts of our annual report or any spreadsheets dealing with unreported numbers on any servers but our own.<p>Google really needs to address this issue if it wants companies to move fully to it's solution.

'"Building a sales staff to proffer its applications is a labor-intensive endeavor that hasn't been part of the company's DNA, says Zachary Nelson, CEO of online accounting software maker NetSuite (N). "If you want to sell enterprise software, you have to have salespeople," he says.'<p>This seems the most concise summary of the problem. Enterprise sales is very different than their consumer facing, ad supported businesses. And adding an enterprise style sales force is probably a mistake, as it runs counter to Google's business culture. Then you have two kinds of companies joined at the hip, one that makes decisions by algorithm to keep cost of sales to a minimum, and another that uses steak and strippers to sell product. It is not clear why you should have one firm at that point, rather than spin off the enterprise products into their own entity.<p>'Creating new ways to analyze business data inside Apps has been "harder to get up on the priority list" given Google's long list of projects, according to Sam Schillace, a Google engineering director who created the software that's the basis for Google's word processor.'<p>On the other hand, this seems the place where Google could add value. Surely, there must be Google engineers with clever ideas about how to employ Google's infrastructure and machine learning algorithms to slurp in all the data in a business's spreadsheets and spit out interesting, actionable information that would be difficult for that business to recreate on its own?

I had a discussion 3 weeks with coworkers. I thought the reason why Google Apps and others are not making that progress fast enough is not purely technology limitation on the web platform. Google are in fact may be very careful not to put themselves in the same pair of shoes as Microsoft did to get sued on basis of anti-trust.<p>Of course now we all heard from Techcrunch that DOJ has interested in building possible case against Google.

I'd use Google Apps more if they were actually Google App Engine applications which I could choose to run locally, on Google's server or on a third-party's system.

Inertia.<p>The same thing keeping anyone stuck on outmoded middle of the road platforms like Office. But Google are good enough to be picking folk up in various niches, and there's other smaller players getting play too. Standard disruptive innovation stuff.<p>Some of this article sounds a bit anti-Google, pro-Microsoft but really if, as far as GE is concerned, Microsoft is simply one of three options for an office suite, and its main plus is local data (rather than say total omnipresence) then compared with a few years ago that's a terrible place for Microsoft to be.

The answer is really simple - a solid marketing campaign is missing. They have relied on public attention for every other product they've produced (AdSense and AdWords included).

"What's Holding Back Google Apps?"<p>Speed and simplicity.<p>Microsoft Office is slow and complicated. Google Apps are slower and, in some ways, more complicated.<p>Need examples of outrageous successes using speed and simplicity: email, instant messaging, texting, .txt files. Google Apps must be more like these, faster and simpler, for widespread adoption.

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