'Google's crap for business' - CIOs give ad giant dose of reality
UK tech chiefs snub Choc Factory's paltry package
Posted in Management, 4th September 2012 16:02 GMT
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UK CIOs don't consider Google a valuable enterprise supplier, according to a new survey.
Of the heads of IT of large British firms surveyed by bean counters at the Corporate IT Forum, more than half saw the Chocolate Factory as a company suitable for ordinary punters. Just five per cent think that it's a credible supplier to businesses.
"There is huge potential for Google to do great things in the corporate market," Forum exec David Roberts said in a canned statement. "However, there are several issues - or perceived issues - holding back corporate users, mainly Google’s ‘missing features’ when compared with mainstream offerings such as Microsoft."
Any businesses that are using Google gear are light users who aren't relying on a lot of its products. Google Earth and Google Maps were the best out of the bunch firms use; nearly 70 per cent of those polled rated them excellent or good. The worst was the Chromebook, the only Google-branded product to be stamped as poor.
According to the Forum, Google needs to change its cost, licensing and privacy fineprint to bag more enterprise clients as well as getting third-party endorsements and accreditations.
"Though many people have favourable perceptions and experiences of Google in the consumer market place, enterprises are still constrained on what they can procure with confidence in the corporate market," the Forum said.
More than 57 organisations participated in the "Google Reality Checker" survey carried out in July and 100 senior IT people responded. ®
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COMMENTS
Less than useless, damagingly bad journalism.
This is why I'm not a big fan of El Reg anymore. It used to be cute and funny when the tone of an article wasn't up to corporate standards, but at least the content was there. This is just a crap hack job.
Everyone knows Google Docs isn't up to snuff and needs more meat to be considered for business environments. But this article is just anti-Google masturbation fuel and has no business being published.
"Near identical"?
You mean, like the inability to set basic account options (like forwarding rules) from any browser other than IE running on a Windows OS? That's not "near identical", that's crippleware.
Apples and oranges?
The article doesn't provide enough information, but I have to assume that CIOs were comparing Google's (necessarily) online offerings with traditional Microsoft desktop software and related services. I haven't met anyone who rates Microsoft's online services favourably; and Outlook Web Access is frankly crap* in comparison with GMail (although "webmail" and "enterprise" hardly belong in the same sentence).
*My PHB tells me that OWA is "much better" under IE, but I can't be arsed to check, as webmail is rather pointless if it doesn't work decently on all modern standards-compliant browsers.
Re: Apples and oranges?
Actually Microsoft does read your emails, they even state so in their new terms and conditions, which, just like Google, have been made the same across all of there online products. Hardly herd a whisper from the press about that through.
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