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Google Lags Badly In Corporate Software

  • Fortune, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 11:15 AM
Google reps are shilling the heck out of Google Apps to business owners, but with relatively little success, Fortune reports. Indeed, the search king has a long, long way to go before it cracks the market for corporate software that Microsoft so thoroughly dominates. As one IT professional said recently (after declining an offer from Google), "I don't know if [Google Apps] is ready for prime time yet."

Eighteen months into its corporate push, Google Apps is only being used by a handful of Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies--and none of these embraced the Google software suite in its entirety, most opting to stick with Microsoft Office instead. Meanwhile, the earnings gap between Google Apps and Office is enormous: last year, Microsoft sold $12.2 billion worth of Office software, while Google pulled in just $4 million from Google Apps.

This is an extremely tough market for Google to crack for a few reasons, the report says. One, switching from one set of corporate software tools to another is hugely time-consuming. Two, the idea of hosting sensitive corporate information on someone else's server troubles many IT execs--"even if it's Google."

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