A new survey by NPD has found that the 73% of Americans have never heard of Google Docs and other online office applications, but perhaps worst still only 0.5% of respondents have abandoned desktop office applications for an online alternative. 94% of Americans have never tried a web based productivity suite.
To be fair though, the survey was of “600 PC users” so it (possibly) didn’t count Mac users for example, nor really ask enough people to even be a statistically valid survey of computer users.
Although some will undoubtedly use the figures as proof that online applications are failing to gain popular acceptance, they do represent an opportunity waiting to happen. Google and others are working hard to change the way businesses use basic services such as wordprocessing with a continued marketing push into the enterprise sector. The challenge is to overcome over 25+ years of what people consider to be normal (desktop apps) by proving that the online alternative is ready and capable of being used. There’s little doubt today, at least based on OS X and Linux adoption figures that there is a very real and definite move away from Microsoft, accelerated by the disaster that is Vista. Whilst there are always desktop alternatives on both platforms, there will be a continuing number of users who question the need to buy Microsoft Office, be that as an upgrade for an existing OS, or brand new as they switch to Mac. It’s a slow switch, but given the online alternatives there is little doubt that the number making the switch to online apps will continue to grow.
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Our IT guy pointed out that no IT manager is going to make himself redundant to Google. Since (s)he is the person who also recommends which software to use, and decides what people can access, it’s definitely going to be a while before we see these apps take off in the office.
One simple fact has been, a lot of Google Docs first-time users got directed
to try Google Docs from within a Gmail session (clicking on the Gmail-provided
link to open [to view or to further edit and/or share(?)] an office-created
document attachement). My user-experience with that was.. quite marginal.
ummm… 600 is far more than enough to be statistically significant. central limit theorem
ha
Also, most people are afraid of learning something new or taking the time. At one company I freelance with, the executive secretary didn’t even know how to use powerpoint. I read the help files and tutored her. She didn’t even have enough sense to use the help files.
sincerely,
angela hayden
art goddess
p.s. I’m a graphic designer and despise powerpoint and any other microsoft program. They are a pain in the ass to use and you can’t design shit with them. Powerpoint sucks!
“disaster that is Vista”
TechCrunch on Apple’s payroll now?
Another thing, I hope google comes up with something more design oriented than powerpoint. As a graphic designer I often asked to take my designs (from illustrator or photoshop) and make a pretty powerpoint presentation with them.
Well, powerpoint sucks! I’ve said that before. Google better use some actual intuitive design programming similar to adobe products with their version of powerpoint.
sincerely,
angela hayden
art goddess
P.S. Microsoft office products suck!
“Sometimes use and desktop apps”? “Sometimes use but no desktop apps”? Has that chart been cropped on the right hand side or does NPD just not speak English?
Anyway, I called a Mac user to ask him what he thought. He said he’s really cold because the iPhone’s ruinously expensive contract takes up what used to be his heating budget. Oh, and he needed a new laptop to run the new OS so it’s baked beans for dinner for the next three months. He thinks he may have rickets. I asked him what he thought about Google Docs specifically and he said he didn’t have much call for spreadsheet programs at his job as a “coffee consultant” at Starbucks that he’s only doing until his Facebook app company gets VC funding.
There you go, straight from the horse’s mouth, the opinion of a Mac user.
The concept is too foreign to digest; replacing MS office with some online version.
Doing office stuff on your desktop is and has been the way of doing things, lol - it’s tuff to convince the masses to make such a transition
those stats don’t surprise me
as for gary coleman - it’s a shame of what has become of him, but i still like him.
“pay your bills on time and everybody will love you” –gary coleman
If I am going to use online applications for all my daily work, then I guess I can get rid of my copy of MS Office Pro. And hey, do I really need a duo or quad core CPU, gobs of RAM, super video card and huge terabyte+ Raid’d hard drive setup? Probably not. Everyone for thin-client computing, raise your hand. Maybe time to short much of the current tech industry, no?
I think this is a good example of where techies and early adopters convince each other that an application/website/trend is huge, where in reality it doesn’t affect an overwhelming majority of the online population. I would bet a similary significant proportion haven’t heard of Digg either.
Weird even when the survey was not done right!
Msft once had their directions right about their “smart clients” concept
(yes, desktop-based, internet-connected — let’s forget about their .Net
stuff and their Vista for this discussion..) and suddenly web2.0 came,
and the whole world’s focus shifted to web-based stuffs, because
people can monetize from google adsense and google search results.
And, by way of coincidental convenience, google banned the carriage
of google adverts on desktop applications, and this move simply killed
all enthusiasm of the windows developers.. essentially, bring almost
a sudden death to the smart clients frameworks.. everything now are
javascript and json and jquery (all are good stuff, to be sure)..
On the other hand, google inserted the little search box into firefox,
thus blessing mozilla firefox with hundred million revenue a year… by
way of, can it be called double-standard, at best? (and, evil, at worst.)
If there’s web2.0, would desktop2.0 ever see the light of tomorrow?
Msft.. where are you these days…
If google wants to get people to make the jump from (mostly) ms office products, I think they need to make the compatibility better. I actually, really, more then once, tried to use google docs and when uploading word or powerpoint to google, all formatting goes to hell. Powerpoint especially - any images, arrows, tables etc go completely screwy. They can’t expect to win users if they need to them to go cold-turkey and start building their docs entirely from scratch within google.
Google Apps aims primarily at IT professionals and not PC users… having said that Microsoft will be very satisfied with this poll results…
This will not happen anytime soon because of the conversion, as Liz pointed out in 15. There is a generational conversion that must occur—changing a lot of peoples minds about what is a Word processor is at a very young age. For me this space is going absolutely no where. But there are some promising examples of where the Web can start to be an app.
First of all I DO NOT have friends working for or associated with Picnik—the browser-based image editor. Try their product and you’ll see they’ve used Flash 9’s rich tools to create a very hefty and useful image editor. You really feel like you’re in a desktop app. And as the build more compression options and filters into their app, the more they start to become an alternative to Photoshop (ifyou don’t need all those features)
Adobe’s Buzzword is another great example. It uses Flash. It’s interface is not perfect, but it again is a step in the right direction. But the conversion is key.
No IT Manager is going to put their butt on the line a recommend not purchasing the World’s most widely distributed Office suite. The market will have to ask for it, and the only way that will happen is endoctrination (sp?) at a very early age.
Disaster that is Vista? what disaster, I’m using Vista Home premium and love it
I have a friend with a Mac book pro and the greatest step backwards to the Mac OS ever created called Leopard.
She has no idea about Google docs, she’s too busy with all the bugs in her latest OS upgrade to notice anything else right now.
Perhaps you could cite an authoritative user survey or sales numbers to show that Vista is a “disaster.” Or is that just the writer’s opinion?
The ability to collaborate with others (in real time) is the killer feature of Google Docs. But, overall, Google has a long way to go to make Docs reliable enough for mainstream use. About once a week, people in my company run into cases where Google docs mysteriously deletes multiple revisions of the document without warning. Spreadsheets can also be extremely slow to update during editing.
The fact that these problems are going unfixed for many months makes me wonder if Google is really serious enough about Docs to invest in the service to make it a stronger competitor to Microsoft (same could be said for Google Calendar).
To be fair, web browsers were not designed to be application development platforms, so it’s quite amazing that Google (and others) have been able to do as much as they have within them. But there is a long way to go to be worthy of being “mainstream”.
I’m not really surprised at the outcome - even my techie friends don’t use online apps too often. Seriously - we are at the beginning of new era. Computers took about 20 years to mass adoption, it took Linux 10 years to scratch Windows. Web2.0 is just about 2 years old (in a usable form). If anything - two conclusions can be found:
1. If we have X amount of Ad-Cash from 1.9% adoption, we still have way to go - and loads to earn
2. We still have plenty of development work to make Web Apps usable enough for average user.
How far can the mediocrity of Office stretch? It’s 2007, and today i was churning out a 100 page Word document only to have it crash three times.
It really felt like i was stuck back in 1999. Anyone else feel this way using Office these days? Our computers have ten times the computing power they did in 1999, but some apps feel about as sluggish as they’ve always been.
Bring on Cloud applications. Let some big fat super computer crunch my pissant needs, and serve them back to me on my Mac.
Google Docs is encumbered by the fact we must use a web browser as the middleware to access it. Perhaps Google should introduce their own web client.
I agree with Chris. Everyone is very excited about Google apps, excited so much, that even ready to put their most sensitive information in the docs or in notebooks. However there are not that many people who realize that since google doesn’t offer SSL encrypted connection, storing valuable information there as safe as not locking a door of your house when you leave it.
That’s probably why companies are not going with google aps.
Also everybody should keep in mind now, that convenience of google comes with sacrifice of privacy.
Personally I am very upset at google being so cheap. Why not to enable encryption ? Guy’s it’s not that expensive!
The power of Google Docs is in collaboration, nowhere else. Client based apps can not even come close to Google Docs when working in a team or even for a couple sharing a shopping list…. try it , it is addictive. And no, I have no stock nor do I work at Google. Remember, writely was a measely start up less than 2 years ago - we are just at the starting point for web based apps.
I have been preaching the virtues of web apps for almost two years now. Unfortunately, it is such a foreign concept for many people that making the paradigm shift from the desktop to the cloud is a gargantuan one for many. Personally, I like Zoho Office and work between it and Google Docs on my Linux machines and new EEE PC. The more we write and talk about Web apps, the more we can send Redmond a wake up call that there way of doing business is becoming antiquated.
>Why not to enable encryption?
It does.. just start your session with https://docs.google.com
well, at least i got an SSL connection throughout the whole docs session..
(unless, if automatically forced back to http (not https) [for some countries?]
>The fact that these problems are going unfixed for many months [...]
Exactly. If a $200-Billion-dollar company, ie., being the world’s-5th-largest,
is showing the kind of development effort results of which can be achieved
by one, or two, or five developers on some self
financing basis.. mightbe they shouldn’t really be bragging much about it..
(Of course, google will tell you, our one programmer equals one-thousand
average-joe programmers… yea.. yea.. sure.. sure.. buy more companies…)
[unfortunately, YDRIVE doesn't do office apps -- our unworthy disclosure :-D]
” there is little doubt that the number making the switch to online apps will continue to grow”
You must be kidding.
@ #4 Chris: “And if you think any company in the world is going to entrust their documents with Google (or any other company) then you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
My company trusts Google with many of our documents.
#24 MB is absolutely right on.
Desktop apps can do even better collaboration than web-based apps.
Proof is trivial — remember that the browser itself is a desktop app.
Pls don’t tell me you’re going to write your PPTs on your jphone.
>accelerated by the disaster that is Vista.
Since it has sold about 2.5 times as many copies as all the macs that have ever existed…what does that make mac?
I guess from the tone of the article the author really likes Google Docs and thinks the only reason why people aren’t using it is because they don’t know about it.
Sheesh lets get objective.
YDRIVE
You dont sound like you do very much mobile work? The jphone or gphone is a media originated myth. Linux based feature phones using Android are just a way to get us on the net from the phone so we use adwords…. that is just the way of the world…. whatever the device, collaboration is king and web based apps require less memory and sophisticated OSs - thus they will grow faster than pc like devices that require powerful chips and more advanced OSs…. Just look at PCs they will be free within 5 years and the browser is the most distributed application in history!!! Lets enjoy watching what happens!! great string here
If people don’t know about it then drive more filler ads for Google Docs.
Wouldn’t it be ironical that, people depend on google to make known of their
product to the world, yet google itself cannot make known of its own product
to, who? mac users?? hmmmmmmmmm…….
TC/Web2.0 crowd != mainstream
I think these enterprise sectors need a good social networking platform, these will help to grow such apps.
> [...][...][...] within 5 years [...][...][...]
that’s what’s been said of 3G and Java and .NET etc. exactly 5 years ago…
so you’re trying to tell me you’re creating your PPTs on your phone?.. wow…
well by jphone i didn’t quite mean gphone.. actually was referring to iphone but s/i/j/ so as “not to touch the nerves of the mac users”
Not surprising, no where to go but up, and that will indeed happen. I originally thought writely was dumb, not I use for all non fancy docs and love it.
>thus they will grow faster than pc like devices that require powerful chips and more advanced OSs
Well, if you’ve tried doing something slightly serious on an ARM7 (or even ARM9) driven phone before… [our experience: (if I could paraphrase MA's past remark about his sometimeago GoDaddy experience) Want to throw it out of the window!]
Google Dogs isn’t a substitute for any kind of word processor until it at least supports paragraphs. (As in, paragraph breaks as well as line breaks.)
assuming the study is true, it’s an excellent long term investment play for Google stock owners. And Microsoft of course assuming MSFT can get it’s act together and offer and effectively market an online version of Office. Major problem to adoption:
- Trust (belief that documents wont end up in the public realm through a data loss catastrophe)
I think Ilya hit it right on.
I’m not familiar with the numbers, but I would be willing to say that most MS Office users, use it at work and on their work laptops. If their employer does not adopt the product, chances are they will not. Is that something we can generally agree on?
Then one of the problems here lies in that companies do not store their documents outside of their walls. And they shouldn’t! Some companies completely block access to Google Docs. What is needed is a solution that could be deployed inside a corporation, which can then be accessed using SSL. Thick-client MS Office solutions already exist, but the idea is to create an enterprise Google Docs. But if a company uses some kind of internal Google Docs-like product, users will be exposed to the thin client mentality and will be able to decide on what type of experience they prefer.
Also, to be successful, Google Docs and other products need a feature set that will be equivalent to MS Office’s. Why? Because even one feature that does not exist on Google Docs may be a gamebreaker for a corporation. (Disclaimer: I’m just stating an issue; I really haven’t looked too much into Google Docs feature set)
I think almost anyone who’s a moderately intensive user will agree that the majority of purely online apps can’t come close to their desktop equivalents… yet. Seriously, if you have some major spreadsheet work to do why would you possibly consider using Google Docs or Zoho? Zoho in particular seems to struggle performance-wise with even moderately complex spreadsheets, and I’d love to know who exactly feels the need to create their spreadsheet on a shared computer in an Internet cafe?
Collaboration is definitely a killer feature, but the creation and editing of the document doesn’t need to be done in the browser to facilitate this
I think its a new way of working that will become popular over time. And I think it is conceivable to use both regularly: I use Microsoft Office for documents I am writing for distribution, but I use Google Apps when I want to share and collaborate with my team or family.
I have even trained my 61 year old Mum in Australia to use it to log my bills that arrive there, and I update the spreadsheet when I have paid the bill (so my mother now doesn’t nag me, she just consults the spreadsheet to see if I have paid)!
Point is - I can see a future where people start to use both solutions, as they solve different problems.
Wait… there are actually people who LIKE Vista?
New pc’s and laptops come with Vista (and trial Office also) pre-installed.. so, like it or not, just like the Internet, it’s not going to go away… (before we want to cite the Coke Classic [ie., WinXP] story too early).. It’s ok, but I like WinXP better.
Ok.. enough spamming for 2007.. taking off for holidays.. see you all in 2008! Thanks TC. Great Media.
What bothers me about Online Word processors is the lack of a view that lets you see where in the page you are.
There’s no clear way of seeing a page break, or setting footers, or headers.
The print part is still a long way off.
What a weird survey. Its like polling users in 1978 to see how many have heard of email and then declaring email as an innovation to be a failure.
I like the Google docs for collaboration and planning. It is a very simple concept that you have to try - instead of attaching a document and emailing it around (Making lots of copies and stuffing inboxes) you attach people’s e-mail to the document.
It is a new paradigm and will take a while for it to get noticed and adopted to those higher-up the food chain.
For example I just created my first one a few days ago to organize a series of Digital Journalism Seminars in Chicago. (I direct a non-profit group that trains journalists.)
– http://docs.google.com/Doc?doc.....&hl=en
I invited 17 editors and educators to volunteer to help design the program and I could or drop more at any time and control the editing privileges.
Previously I would have used my blog, e-mail and a forum thread to do this and it would have taken longer and required more work to track revisions. This is a great tool. If it will grow - it will grow virally.
I use Google Docs to compliment Office 2004. In particular, Google Docs is a great way to collaborate with other people.
I think a lot of people are also forgetting that Microsoft Office is “pretty good”. Sure a lot of people on this blog and commenting on this blog do not like it (some for legitimate reasons, others for not so legitimate reasons).
But hundreds of millions of people actually DO like Office (even if they only use 10% of its features). And for an additional $100 when you buy a PC, as a business, it’s not that substantial of a cost.
As a result, that makes the Google Docs value proposition much more difficult. And we should remember- that it’s not “collaboration” that is Google Docs value proposition. People collaborate on documents with Office Docs every day. They just email attachments, use conversation and track changes to do so. It’s not ideal.. but it works. Is in-place single copy editing really the killer feature that you need web-based authoring, while giving up the ability to email copies, take them on the road with you, have all sorts of templates?
Is single-copy, in place editing really THAT much of a pain point that would make you switch from something that generally comes with the PC you purchase at very low incremental cost anyway?