
Google Apps attracts 3,000 new businesses a day, search giant claims  - strawberryshake
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/cloud-computing/3289699/google-apps-attracts-3000-new-businesses-a-day-search-giant-claims/
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macavity23
"A large proportion of the customers are small and medium-sized businesses"

A present-day startup would have to be insane to spend cash on installed
office software, when GApps and other cloud-based offerings offer features for
free that cost $$$ and take serious configuration effort to get working with
MS Office, such as collaboration/sharing (Sharepoint! Ugh!)

And once a company is using a browser-based office suite, I can't see them
migrating to MS Office as they grow, except for some specialised tasks, such
as large-scale financial modelling in Excel.

Word is massive overkill for intra-company documents, and I honestly prefer
<http://prezi.com> to Powerpoint for presentations (though Keynote is still
top of the heap IMHO).

I'd be interested in seeing a web-based equivalent of MS Access - super easy
database creation and hosting. Anyone got any links?

It all spells trouble for MS in the medium term, I would say.

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inam
"It all spells trouble for MS in the medium term"

Only if Google increases their level of support. I work at a large business
and we spoke with both Google and Microsoft. Though I'm a Google fanboy, I'll
admit that the level of support from Microsoft is currently much better than
Google. Microsoft's cost of implementation was also lower.

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BvS
Could you elaborate how/why Microsoft's implementation was cheaper?

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inam
Perhaps I should have said I work for a large _educational_ institution.
Microsoft was free and Google was going to cost around $200k.

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ditojim
Google Apps for EDU is free.

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BvS
That's what I thought or are the 200k for training people who have been used
to MS Office etc.?

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mtkd
Apps is not compatible with quite a few Google products currently - including
Google+.

It's a great product, but as soon as you start paying you do feel like you've
become a second-class citizen to Google.

Possibly indicates that non-paying domestic customers are worth more than
£33/year to Google in revenue.

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joshuacc
It is easy enough to use Google+ etc. by enabling simultaneous sign-in of an
Apps account and a regular Google account.

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hankejh
wow -- that's a whopping 0.019% per year! [ snore ]

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pasbesoin
So, what are people using to back up their data? I'm familiar with doing it
piecemeal; does anyone have an integrated solution that covers the entire
domain (from an administrator account/credentials)?

