Renting vs Buying

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

$50 / year for an office suite sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it?  Google is hoping you’ll think that too, as they tempt users to sign up for their new Google Apps bundle.  Various pundits are hailing this move as Google’s entry into the office productivity space, with headlines such as Google Targets Microsoft, Google Package Challenges Microsoft, and Google Battles Microsoft Head-On. 

So what do you get?  Well, everything that’s currently in the Google bundle you use today – mail, calendar, spreadsheet, word processor, RSS reader, and a dashboard (which I haven’t yet tried) – plus up to 10 Gigs of storage, your own domain name, 24/7 support, service guarantees, and the ability to strip out the Google ads. 

In other words, not much more than you already have for free.

How does it compare to Microsoft Office?  Poorly.  There’s a reason why Office costs what it does.  It includes more, like Powerpoint presentations, for starters.  The Office applications are far more powerful, more usable, better integrated, and produce better results.  And lastly, they run faster, because they’re not hosted.  In terms of functionality, the Google Apps bundle is much more like Microsoft Works, the downscale package Microsoft has sold for 20 years now to students, families and small businesses.    Works sells for …. $49.95, direct from Microsoft.  You can get it for $35 at retail.  That’s a one time license fee, not an annual fee.

It’s that old rich client / thin client argument all over again.  A couple of guys named McNeally and Ellison cooked that doozy up over a decade ago.  The problem is that we can all see that the offerings just haven’t been that great, and Googles latest isn’t a lot different. Nobody can figure out why we should rent low value software from them, when we can just go and buy the real thing…

Om Malik said it best: “Will Google be successful? Who knows – it is fun to watch though!”

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.