What Google Needs to Defeat Microsoft

Google and Microsoft are now going head to head in cloud based services. Each company has its own strengths.  Microsoft dominates the PC and laptop OS arena.  Android, has a more powerful presence with its Android OS on laptops and phones.  Google also has a powerful lead in free email. 

For this post, I'm ignoring third big competitor in the arena, Apple, since they do not seem to be pushing for dominant control of cloud services beyond users of their own phones, tablets, and laptops.

Google is seeking to expand its presence by pushing Google Drive, a host of applications that allow document creation and collaboration, among other things.  This puts them more and more into competition with Microsoft Office.  Microsoft has been moving its Office Suite to the cloud with MS Office 365.  While you can still download MS Office onto your hard drive, more and more work can be done directly in the cloud.  The subscription model further makes Microsoft look more like a service provider than a software seller.

Microsoft's strategy seems clear.  It wants to use its market dominance in the Office market, to move individuals and businesses into its cloud services.  It makes sense.  Businesses especially are so tied into the MS Office world that it is nearly impossible to collaborate with other businesses without having MS Office yourself.  If they can leverage that, as well as dominance in Outlook to draw users into its cloud storage and online email services, it becomes a major player in that field, and moves away from the collapsing market of selling software to PC users.

Google's strategy similarly reflects its desire to leverage its strengths in search and email to move people into its other cloud services.  Google encourages its Gmail users to use Google Drive, where they can create and share documents, spreadsheets, and other works.

Microsoft's greatest weakness is probably its recent reputation for overpriced buggy bloatware, for falling behind in the race to keep up fast paced technology trends, and for its tendency to gouge customers for maximum short term profit.  The fact that its solution is much more expensive than Google's only contributes to this preconception.

Google's greatest weakness is its lack of any reputation in the enterprise arena.  While businesses use its search services or other online free services such as Google Maps, they have been reluctant to move to Google's enterprise email offerings or use of Drive as the only way to create documents.  At best, businesses use them as a supplement for online collaboration, while still relying on MS Windows computers running MS Office for office work and MS Outlook connected to MS Exchange for email.

Microsoft has every incentive to tie Windows, Office, and Outlook into its cloud services and offer a smooth transition for businesses.  Microsoft has zero incentive to make it easier to access your Google Drive documents from MS Office or to integrate Windows into your Google cloud storage, or improve Outlook interoperability with Gmail.  If history is any guide, you will see MS create deliberate bugs that make interoperabliity with Google a real headache.

This makes Google's fight much harder.  Google will not capture the OS market any time soon.  Google Chrome will not replace Windows in the foreseeable future.  Android does not seem to be able to leap from tablets to laptops.  Therefore, Google has to focus on making its cloud services so much better and less expensive that people will go out of their way to use them.

To do this, Google must come up with a more powerful office suite.  Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides are ok for simple documents.  But they simply do not have the tools that professionals need to create more complex documents.  One great option would be a partnership with an open source Office suite like LibreOffice.  Another option would be to buy a dying competitor like WordPerfect Office.

Either way, Google could integrate the office application into Google.  It could allow subscribers to download the office suite, or make the suite itself cloud based.  Either way, users would have a much more powerful office suite with which to use Google's online document system.

Google has done well with individuals who want convenient free apps.  But if it wants to get the more profitable enterprises to get on board with Google, it needs to have a serious Office suite for business users.

A lesson from QWERTY

The traditional keyboard layout on virtually all computer keyboards today is a direct holdover of the layout on typewriters going back well into the 1800's.  The first practical typewriters were on the market in the 1860's.  By the 1870's almost everyone was using the standard QWERTY keyboard layout that we still use today.

Was there anything particularly wonderful about this layout?  Not really.  In fact, many have complained over the years that its layout is inefficient.  Heavily used letters are not keyed to fingers that can respond most quickly.  People have shown in many instances that a person trained on keyboards with keys optimized for speed can improve typing speeds considerably.  Why then, do we continue with the QWERTY standard?

The reason, of course, is that virtually all typists have trained for years on this standard.  Everyone knows it very well.  Changing the layout would cause great confusion and chaos for all professional typists.  The years of retraining and relearning typing far outweigh the small performance improvement that might eventually be of benefit.

Technology industry leaders seem to have forgotten this concept, or at least decided to ignore it.  Apple has often been a repeat offender, completely changing user interfaces and failing to support legacy applications.  Microsoft seems to have adopted this view with gusto in more recent years as well.  It's complete rewrites of the way the MS Office menus work, and it's disastrous release of Windows 8 with a completely new interface has angered users and scared off many long time customers, who either refuse to upgrade, or figure its time to look at competitors since they have to learn a whole new interface anyway.

In the age of cloud applications, this problem has only gotten worse.  When MS came out with an Office interface that no one wanted, users could stick with the old version for many years until they were eventually forced to get a new computer no longer compatible with the old software.  But with Cloud computing the manufacturer can change the interface on you without notice, forcing you to relearn tasks which you could do just fine yesterday.

Sure, sometimes these changes are arguably for the better (although often not).  Sometimes a new look may get customers to take a second look at your product.  It may also help give the illusion that the company is changing things and therefore remaining new and cutting edge.

But more and more, users are seeing technology as a tool to accomplish tasks, not a great new innovation that need to amaze and astound us every six months.  We want to get things done and we don't want to have to re-teach ourselves something we already knew how to do.  Many of of these changes simply cause a reduction in productivity until users are able to become accustomed to the new arrangement.

Technology leaders would be wise to take a queue from QWERTY.  Once something has become a standard, and most people have adopted it, don't change the setup unless there are very good reasons for doing so.