Robert Pogson

“It will cost Boston around $800,000 to move over to Gmail, Google Docs for word processing, and Google’s cloud service for storing documents. But by dropping some Microsoft products, the city government will save at least $280,000 a year.”
see Boston dumps Microsoft Exchange for Google Apps

It sounds like “search” all over again. M$ spends hundreds of millions spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about Google and people still love the value they get from Google. The negatives of using M$’s 365 “solution” solve nothing but how to keep M$’s cash-cow delivering. Having to install local applications just to access the cloud is just plain silly. M$ had better decide whether to stand on the boat or the dock because the boat is leaving. Users get nothing from supporting M$’s desktop monopoly, office suite and then paying more for the cloud… The whole idea of the cloud is to cut cost and complexity. M$ is increasing both.

“We had been using Microsoft Exchange for more than 14 years and it was starting to outlive its usefulness. Tools that we relied on in Exchange 2007 didn’t work when we upgraded to the 2010 version, calendaring was messy and mobile syncing was even tougher. Our Sharepoint server – the center of collaboration for the company – was just not working.

Our search for a cloud-based email and collaboration system came down to Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. While our 1,200 employees were used to Microsoft’s tools, we weren’t convinced their solution fully understood the cloud; Office 365 still required us to install software and hardware. Google Apps was entirely cloud-based and offered everything we needed with a single license – it was the right way to go for us.”

That’s a quote from a long time customer. Did you hear that, M$? That’s the sound of the door closing in your face and true openness in IT taking the place of needless complexity and cost.

As expected, M$’s clumsy attempts to tie cloud services to their boat-anchor of an OS is back-firing. Businesses given a choice can choose Google’s stable of cloud services. Here’s the Weather Company’s thoughts: “The choice came down to Google Apps and Microsoft® Office 365. We knew there were strong allegiances to each platform within the company, so there was no clear winner at first. After taking a closer look at Office 365, though, it seemed like a set of individual tools rather than a fully integrated suite like Google Apps. On top of that, Google Apps’ single user licensing was far less complicated than Microsoft’s model. Ultimately, Google Apps was a better fit for our company.
…
Google Apps has created a real sense of excitement at The Weather Company. People are really exploring and embracing it, and that’s exactly what I wanted to see. As we’re abandoning the traditional top-down IT department mindset, all I can do is provide a toolkit for people to work with. Google Apps gives them those tools and lets them work.”
see The Weather Company forecasts success using Google Apps

In the era of small cheap computers, Bring Your Own Device and web applications, M$ is fading into irrelevance. The world can and does make its own software and gets the job done. Perhaps M$ will not disappear outright but the concept that a single source of supply for operating systems makes any sense is dead for sure. Any time M$ has to compete on price/performance they fall far short of monopoly. Sooner rather than later that knowledge will rearrange retail shelves everywhere.

That didn’t take long. Being first to market with a good product does not guarantee monopoly as some suggest. Apple’s monopoly lasted only a few years.
“Despite retaining the lion’s share of the UK tablet market, Apple has seen its share of ownership drop 10 percentage points in the last year, falling from 73% in Q1 2012 to 63% in Q1 2013. This decline in market share comes despite the recent releases of its 4th generation iPad and iPad Mini.” 
see Quality Android tablets make big inroads into Apple’s market share

Of course, Apple doesn’t have to pay huge premiums to M$ so it may stay relevant for years to come. Android/Linux is being taxed by M$ but only to a tiny amount. Consumers will win in the price/performance war as long as Wintel stays in the shade.

“5 million businesses worldwide that have moved to Google Apps for Business. Enhanced with the features and controls that businesses need to be productive, innovative and successful, Google’s workplace tools are giving some of the world’s oldest and most established businesses a 21st century edge.”
see Official Google Enterprise Blog: Titans of Japanese business embrace the cloud

“Other revenues” was over $2billion last year for GOOG up almost 100% from 2011. This could be a major part of that revenue. Google seems to be one of many major businesses able to capitalize on the economies of scale and the economies of FLOSS to succeed.

You may not be a major corporation but you can get the same economies of FLOSS as Google by using one of many GNU/Linux distros for your IT. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux which has a huge repository of FLOSS, a great package-manager and which will have a major release any day now.

“Google has announced it is moving forward with its own fork of WebKit called Blink. The new fork will power the Chromium and Chrome web browsers. Opera, which is tracking the Chromium build of WebKit, said, via employee Bruce Lawson’s blog, that it will be following Google’s fork and also using Blink. Google explained that it was forking because its multi-process browser architecture was different from other WebKit-using browsers and that the complexity and cost of supporting the multiple architectures was slowing it down in terms of development.”
see Google Blinks to fork WebKit

I’ve been using Google’s browser for ages. It is well integrated both with my environment and Google’s web applications. I adopted it for its speed at the time but I stay with it for its features. It works well with Debian GNU/Linux being distributed as an APT package. I can update the OS and my browser all with a single click. The browser is updated frequently just to annoy the malware-artists…

Thanks, Google.

As if the already huge and growing installed base of devices wasn’t enough,
“More and more software developers and free software projects are willing to join development for the Android platform in view of the dynamic shipment growth demonstrated by Android-based smartphones over the past quarters, during which Android smartphones managed to take up a 70% share of the global smartphone market, while rival iOS saw its share slip to 15-20%, according to Digitimes Research.”
see Digitimes Research: More software developers join Android camp

Digitimes also sees this as a threat to Wintel as they advise Wintel to watch out for

• BlueStacks App Player which lets Android/Linux run on legacy PCs, and
• Wine for Android

Oops. There goes the “applications barrier to entry“… Since there’s no need for anyone with a favourite collection of Android apps to use that other OS no matter the hardware and migration is so easy, why put up with M$’s taxes and restrictions?