

Google is eating Microsoft’s lunch, one tasty bite at a time - bfioca
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2010/06/17/google-is-eating-microsofts-lunch-one-tasty-bite-at-a-time/

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pneill
Interesting, but I'm not sure it's meaningful. Consider the following.

1) Their sample data is based on your product usage and people who use rescue
time are probably heavy cloud users. So population set is unfairly waited
toward the cloud.

2) Microsoft's get's the majority of their users and revenue from enterprise
level sales. Google customer on the other hand is primarily the consumer and
small business. This is important because in most enterprise level
environments users can't install an application like rescue time.

3) Lastly people double dip - at work use outlook for work and gmail for
personal.

It would interesting to just look at productivity apps like word processing or
presentation with referrer values from .com addresses only (not logins) . The
trending might be very different.

~~~
montanalow
Our users may include more tech savvy early adopters than the general
population, but capturing that audience is how tech markets are won. This
makes our data more relevant as a leading indicator, not less. If you are a
major software vendor, and you lose the early adopters, you should be worried.

~~~
riffer
I voted you up because you made an interesting point here about early
adopters, but it would have been nice if you made it in the blog post rather
than in the comments here. It would make you more credible. Along a similar
vein, you might consider labeling the y-axis on your graphs with something
like "% of RescueTime users" instead of "% of computer users." My message is
that if you were slightly more qualified in the post, you wouldn't have 75% of
the comments telling you that your post is misguided, and instead the overall
discussion in the comments here would be much more intelligent.

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daleharvey
heh rescuetime have had a string of really interesting blog posts, and without
fail almost every comment from hacker news has been complaining about skew and
bias.

rescuetime can only provide this level of insight for people that use their
software, and that will incur a bias, thats fairly obvious and should go
without saying, or at least repeating constantly.

Cheers guys for some really interesting blog posts, some of us appreciate
them.

~~~
dasil003
Yeah it's interesting, and yeah I think the trend is meaningful.

However I disagree that they can go without mentioning the sample bias,
especially in this case of corporate vs cloud apps. Yes to HN readers (a lot
of whom are working on cloud startups) it's obvious. However to the wider
community of people who might be reading that blog, that is not necessarily
obvious.

~~~
jseliger
In some ways their sample bias might be useful because it shows where the
early adopters and the experimenters are going -- the kind of people who might
lead the larger market by 3 – 10 years.

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brown9-2
I think this is an interesting analysis, and as others have pointed out, it's
unfair to complain that RescueTime user's are representative - the only thing
RescueTime can comment on is what their user's are using.

However I think it is slightly misleading to include "Gmail" under the
umbrella of "Google Apps" when comparing them to Microsoft Office. It would be
fairer to only include the individual Google Docs apps compared to what is
included in Microsoft Office.

Many Microsoft Office users might be using Gmail for personal mail
simultaneously while not using any other Google Docs products.

However most users of Google Docs are likely not also using Outlook (in
isolation of the other Office apps) for their email.

~~~
wvenable
More and more users are being exposed to working with online software due to
Gmail. If they compare it with Outlook, they might even find it superior. That
does make it easier to sell people on the idea of Google apps.

~~~
brown9-2
Yes, but I think including Gmail in the aggregate of "Google Apps" makes it
seem like Google Docs is kicking Office's butt.

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mahmud
RescueTime's user-base is hardly representative. They're very computer savvy,
avid social-media participants and care about their work and productivity
improvements enough to get an application for it. A very low, one-digit
percentile of computer users.

I would trust this data if it came from an anti-virus vendor, Skype, or any
other application with a huge and diverse installation base.

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BrandonWatson
While this is great data, can you include some data about the makeup of the
sample pool? Specifically, I am wondering how much of a conclusion you can
draw about worldwide, or even US broadly, versus what could potentially be
very a highly technically adept audience, thus skewing one way or another.

~~~
pierrefar
Exactly. Someone using Rescue Time is not your typical mainstream Microsoft
user.

So yes, sure, there is a segment in the market that Google is winning.

~~~
bfioca
While this may have been true initially, over the years this is no longer the
case. Especially as we have grown adoption of our business offering, which
caters to teams inside a broad range of companies and worker types.

As we went from the early adopter crowd to the broader population, you would
expect to see MS Office trending up as a whole.

~~~
BrandonWatson
To be clear, I am not throwing stones. I am, of course, a MSFT employee, so I
have a bit of bias there. As a data junkie I like to ensure that the right
conclusions can be drawn. A post like this, when contrasted with the $4+
billion that the Office group makes, well it's hard to draw the dire
conclusions that one might make from this data in a vacuum.

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Revisor
This is an arrogant post ignoring the skew towards technical users and users
of cloud applications (which Rescuetime and Google Docs both are), similar to
the way the Alexa results used to be skewed.

What bothers me is not the dumb post, but the fact that the author doesn't
even try to explain the difference and apparently people behind Rescuetime
defend the post here at HN as if it was real research.

No trend can be read out of this data.

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seshagiric
I am using Office 2010 since last two months and I think it is solid. In fact
use a non-IE browser to try the online versions from office.live.com. Try
OneNote. Despite the article I do not think Google docs compares that well.

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nopinsight
All graphs end around December 2009. I wish they have included more recent
data in the charts.

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arvinjoar
Excerpt from <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html> :

" _11\. Web Office apps. We're interested in funding anyone competing with
Microsoft desktop software. Obviously this is a rich market, considering how
much Microsoft makes from it. A startup that made a tenth as much would be
very happy. And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by
Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and
their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job
of building web-based Office variants themselves. Before you try to start a
startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing
web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're
going to beat that._ "

Relevant? I think so.

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huherto
Could it be that the market intelligence RescueTime is gathering is more
valuable than what individual users are getting? I can really see the big guys
(MS,Google et al) providing similar tools just to be able to see this info.
Specially MS since they can just put it in their O.S.

~~~
panacea
> [E]specially MS since they can just put it in their O.S.

Wouldn't that generate a shitstorm of criticism for monitoring users, or do
you mean some sort of opt-in protocol?

~~~
huherto
yes, evidently they would have to make it opt-in. But it may not be that hard
to do since they would give value to the individuals. (Telling you how you are
spending your time)

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chaosmachine
The major problem I see here is you're measuring "Time Spent" (in the 3rd
graph, at least). If a product is really innovative, it should take up less of
the user's time, not more.

If Outlook suddenly became twice as efficient, you'd expect to see "Time
Spent" decreasing.

~~~
Splines
Only if the number of things that you used to do was fixed. Adding features
and increasing performance could possible cancel out, timewise.

That said, I think determining the utility of a product from the amount of
time spent in it is a very difficult thing to do. Deriving utility from time
spent, and then comparing it between products seems very nebulous at best.

Personally, I'm fine with RescueTime's presentation of the graph here. In the
end, eyeballs are eyeballs. I don't know if you could generate a metric (from
RescueTime, anyway) that could measure product innovation.

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BoppreH
Tell me, why is Microsoft Word in the same graph as Google Mail?

You claim to compare the Office suite to Google Apps, but I don't think GMail
and Outlook are included in those categories.

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Ionic_Walrus
its all hunky dory in the echo chamber

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jsz0
Even though I do use a bunch of different cloud services I still have a mail
client and a bunch of spreadsheets open at any given time. It's still the most
practical way for me to get work done. I'm not even an Office power-user but I
find Google Docs to be lacking some features that were available to me with MS
Office running on Windows 3.1. I can't justify that type of downgrade just to
save myself a few minutes of work saving, sharing or retrieving a file in a
less convenient way.

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stoney
I guess this is to do with the sample of users, but I'm very surprised at how
low PowerPoint comes out - more or less 0% of users use it? Given how often I
have to suffer through one of those presentations I'd have expected more.

I'd also have expected Word to come higher (it's shown as something like 2-3%
of users) given that most professionals probably use it to write a report from
time to time.

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JoeAltmaier
What lunch? Free apps? How is that important?

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matrix
The initial graph is misleading in a fundamental way: the usage of most of the
Microsoft Office apps has barely changed - this is really an Outlook -vs-
Gmail story, the results of which are no surprise to any of us.

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jheitzeb
Take this with a grain of salt, but I'd imagine that RescueTime's users are
early-adopters, and as such may be the tip of the arrow indicating future
trends. Hence, this is fairly interesting data.

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vln
I don't see Google Spreadsheet eating Excel's lunch anytime soon.

~~~
derwiki
Depends on what you're using it for. I plan a lot of big group trips, and
coordinating logistics with Google Spreadsheet has been a lifesaver.

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ananthrk
Interesting analysis. It would be interesting to track this after we give some
time for web-based Office 2010 to catch up.

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aresant
The data the RescueTime typically collects is heavily gaurded intellectual
property amongst nearly every Fortune 500 - EG MSFT's bread and butter profits
- and I doubt they have any meaningful penetration into those markets.

~~~
bfioca
I can't release those details specifically yet but you'd be surprised.

~~~
aresant
I'm looking forward to hearing - if you've made good inroads into the MSFT
dominated corporate IT world I will personally send a case of beer to your
office.

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FlorinAndrei
And here's to many more!

