
Microsoft: Here's why Google Apps suck - shrikant
http://www.youtube.com/user/officevideos#p/c/5BA7E1E86EE6BA12
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Alterlife
Nice to know that Microsoft can rely on Google to host it's advertisements.

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pietro
More like, pay for the distribution. That's a pretty sweet deal for anyone.

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chrisbolt
The "Why Microsoft: Exchange vs. Gmail" video would be better titled "Why
Microsoft: Exchange vs Exchange on Gmail", since half of the issues are with
Google's Exchange integration.

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troels
Or more specifically - According to Microsoft, the problem with Gmail seems to
be that it doesn't integrate with Microsoft Exchange. Which isn't surprising,
since it's a closed, proprietary platform.

Rather twisted to sell vendor lock-in as a feature, isn't it?

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hga
Isn't the whole point of vendor lock-in to establish it and then sell based on
it?

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batiudrami
This seems like a very silly ad campaign by Microsoft. As a company who is in,
by far the dominant position in terms of productivity suites, I can't see any
reason why you'd start comparing other products such as Google Docs and OO.o
with yours - it makes them look like they _are_ comparable, except that some
of them are free.

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RyanMcGreal
OO.o Calc sort-of compares with Excel 2003, i.e. it's not quite as good but
given the price (free) and the level at which most people make and use
spreadsheets, it's Good Enough.

However, it seems pretty clear from the Excel / Calc comparison video that
Excel has moved far ahead in power (watching it, I noticed that they seem to
have fixed a lot of the pain points I currently have with Excel '03) whereas
Calc is still stalled.

Disclosure: I use XP/Office 2003 at work and Ubuntu / OO.o at home.

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nailer
The Google Docs vs Excel is pretty scathing: the user can't open the document
from GMail, and even simple stuff like charts are removed from the
spreadsheet.

Google do search and maps really well, but Google apps. including GMail, still
aren't very popular (Yahoo mail is apparently huge). They're an engineering
company, they still don't get user experience. There's still no preview window
in gmail, documents are shown with very long lines of text that are difficult
to read when compared with the common newspaper-column layout. Google need to
start hiring UI people yesterday if they want to compete with MS in the office
space.

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Kejistan
I've asked this in previous threads about mail applications, but what is an
email preview window/pane for? How is it any different from actually opening
the email? GMail (and apps) definitely has room for improvement, but lack of
preview is such an oft cited "problem" yet I don't even understand the
complaint. (I use GMail for all my email)

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nailer
Simple:

(time taken to close window ) x (amount of messages per day)

Compare 'Alt-F4, up arrow' with 'up arrow'.

Making the text width narrower also increases your reading speed, around 6-12
words per column is apparently the ideal width and is the basis for all
newspapers, and since suck.com started it in the late 90s, the majority of
websites.

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Kejistan
Thanks for the explanation!

I'd also like to take the time to point out that you can get similar
functionality using the vim-style keyboard hotkeys in gmail: j/k to move to
the next/previous conversation.

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nailer
No prob. Keyboard shortcuts are useful when they work (j and k don't in Chrome
5 on my laptop, OS X 10.6), but a lot of users use the preview bar to skip
messages too.

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Feynman
Sadly enough, that little bit in the video about corporate people spending all
day in their Outlook is way too close to truth...

Looks like the guys at MS decided to take a lesson or two from Xobni.

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brianobush
what does it have to do with google apps? they mentioned nothing about google,
nor was anything obviously inferred.

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CWIZO
Look at the videos on the right, they compare Microsoft's products to
Google's.

