NW Tech

Google Expands 'Going Google' Ad Campaign Worldwide

Mr. Arrington,

You are the dumbest rock today. Below is a comment from GOOGLE on the REAL numbers surrounding GoogleApps. The fact is you have bought into the LIES and DISTORTION that Dave Giroud (Head of Google Enterprise) has been perpetuating for two years.

BOSTON - Google Inc's efforts to persuade businesses to buy its email services suffered a setback this week after a highly publicized outage shut down accounts of millions of corporate customers for almost two hours.

The outage -- one of several in the past year -- underscored fears that Google's email, still lagging Yahoo Inc's in market share -- is not stable or reliable enough for corporate users.

The Internet giant apologized for the problem, pledged its best to prevent a recurrence of the problem, explained what went wrong and added three days to year-long subscriptions to its corporate Google Apps email service, which costs $50 per-user-per-year.

"The giveback in credit in any email situation is always bitter money. Everybody would always rather have uptime than a giveback," said analyst Matt Cain of market research firm Gartner Inc.

That may not be enough to compensate for the bad publicity and ill will created by the incident, which was widely covered in the press. It could hamper efforts to persuade businesses to abandon technology from Microsoft Corp and International Business Machines Corp that handle hundreds of millions of email accounts.

"This is bad news for Google. Email is a critical tool and outages are unacceptable," said Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann.

Google hopes to eventually derive a steady revenue stream from corporate users, as growth in its leading online advertising business begins to show signs of slowing.

Known for Internet search ads that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue, it has spent more than 2-1/2 years marketing Google Apps, which includes email as well as calendars, a word processor and other Web-based software.

LIMITED SUCCESS

The effort has so far met with limited success.

Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said the number of paid subscriptions numbers "in the hundreds of thousands." The vast majority of Gmail's 15 million business users use a free version of the service.

Gartner's Cain said Google has only started to gain traction in recent months as it has added key features that businesses demanded. They included support for Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices and letting users delegate use of their email and calendar to another person.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks had been that Google used "beta" to describe the service until July. Cain said that raised concerns that the product was not ready for prime time.

Analysts said that Google has been slow to persuade businesses to pay for the service because it is not easy to convince customers they are getting a premium service.

"Once somebody has gotten into the habit of getting something for free, they expect more for free," said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.

"Google is having a tough time changing people's habits."
Tuesday's outage reinforced those perceptions because paying customers suffered the same as free users. Google Apps promises that it will provide them more reliable service, giving special protection to their data.

"In this case we weren't able to do that, and they were impacted," Kovacs said.

Google Advances Further into Microsoft's Territory

A quick read of the Google SLA is a huge concern for every single business wanting to use ANY Google service.

Google will never compensate a customer for loss of data due to Google problems/issues/errors. Ever!

Google Apps has the same SLA.

Any business doing business with Google is taking one hell of a risk allowing their data to reside on a server where the vendor will never compensate a customer for loss of data due to Google problems.

Google Adds 30,000 App Users in Biggest Enterprise Deal to Date

Do the math.

Supposedly, one million businesses using Google Apps.

Supposedly, ten million people using Google Apps.

According to Google's own numbers, there are tons of ten person firms using Google Apps.

99% of those firms use the FREE version of Google Apps.

I guarantee that Valeo didn't pay anything close to $50 per user per year.

Why can't Google get ALL the FREE users to pay the paltry $50 per user per year?

Google Apps has zero value as FREE whomps on PAID anyday!

Microsoft vs. Google: Battle of Epic Proportions

GoogleApps has zero value for businesses. I say this because 99.9% of GoogleApps users pay zero for the service.

GoogleApps has less than 150K paid users and that number doesn't get ANYONE on ANY software radar screen!

No serious business uses a free service for a mission critical business application.

Also, businesses will never pay for an application that has BETA VERSION listed on the work screen!

Recession Creates Opportunities for Web-Based App Companies

Another shill for Google Apps.

Pathetic as there are much better SaaS applications availble for businesses.

Postini, anyone? Great Google product that has 10,000 times more paid users than Google Apps and solves a problem which every company who has their own domain experiences...threats via email.

Google Opens Doors to Resellers

Michael Arrington, if you believe the numbers Google gives you relating to Google Apps, then you are the greatest sucker living today.

Google is giving resellers a whopping 20% markup and telling resellers they must pay for their own marketing, training, and technical support.

By industry standards, this are pathetic margins when faced with ads, teaching and support questions down the road.

Google is the king of search.

MSFT is the king of the reseller channel. Google's role in the channel is a joke...a very bad joke to boot!

Google and YouTube: Dynamic Duo Dominates Search

When will YouTube actually generate revenue and profits for Google? All of Google's aquisitions have been FLOPS because Dave Girourd, the head of Google Enterprise is a dipshit and cannot market either himself or any of his products to drive any measurable revenue.

Other than for search, Google is a worthless ad agency who dabbles in technology!

Microsoft vs. the Cloud

Google will dominate paid search.

Microsoft will dominate in mission critical business applications.

MSFT is a joke in search.

GoogleApps will never have more than 2-3% of Office users migrate to them.

Buy, Sell or Hold: Google Still Leaves Competitors in the Dust

This "analyst" drinks the Google water and treats it like manna!

Google is a one trick pony and their stock price correctly establishes their corporate value for paid search.

Unless and until Google can produce real revenue and profits from their non-search products, investors will continue to see this stock price make a valiant attempt at $150 per share!

Do Web Versions of Office Applications Hurt Microsoft or Google More?

I recently spent a week at Google HQ to train about GoogleApps. After one week of intense training, I must say that GoogleApps is in no way ready for prime time in ANY sense of the word.

The Google team told us that they are having substantial issues flipping users from the FREE version of GoogleApps to the PAID version. Once someone gets something for FREE, why should they pay for a small incremental change?

GoogleApps itself is a BETA product that is at least 18 months away from thinking about posing a threat to MSFT office. GoogleApps has a weak word processor, an even weaker spreadsheet and the colaboration tools are a work-in-progress.

It was very obvious that the entire GoogleApps team have never shipped a real live product to business users...ever!

The presentations were mixed and contradictory. The information given was weak and and the presentors even weaker.

Google shareholders should be happy that their fortunes are NOT tied to the GoogleApps group.

Search is still Google's only revenue and profit spigot.

GoogleApps won't contribute much to Google's revenue and profit picture...ever!

Share of Online Searches by Engine, Sept. 2008

It is amazing how much market share Google has within paid search.

I believe an Obama DOJ will somehow find a way to investigate Google for potential monopoly practices.

Google Isn't Evil - Just Shortsighted

I am glad to see the DOJ at least look at how Google makes it's rules. No longer do I believe the mantra of "do no evil" as everytime Google changes their algorythm, thousands of small businesses catch a bad case of the cold.

Google: Chrome, Android and The Cloud

Google has a lot of energy minus the synergy across product lines. Google's only source of cash is paid search. Google's only source of profits are from paid search. Personally, I am not sure that Google can be profitable in any area other than paid search.

I hope to be proven wrong, but the reality of today is that Google loves to make splashes, but businesses need to make profits, too!

Search profits will not last forever.

Is Cloud Computing Ready for Prime Time?

Postini service kicks butt. Email is mission critical to our firm and we have used Postini's email security service for many years with never a single interruption in email delivery.

Search Gaining on Email as Universal Activity

Google is well positioned in both areas here. Sweet! Now if Google could convince folks to PURCHASE Google Apps and use the hosted email service!