Google trends now tracks sales of any product being sold by Google Checkout, and Google Apps Premier Edition is sold exclusively using Google Checkout:
The chart shows a step drop in sales for Google Apps Premier Edition starting in mid December and not picking up in the new year. As noted by Google Blogscoped (who also spotted the chart), other products show a decline around this time meaning that it could simply be a case of flawed data in the trends tool itself, or simply its a seasonal thing. Either way you can track sales by going directly to the chart here. If it doesn’t pick up again by the end of the month we’ll start to ask some deeper questions as to the success or otherwise of the paid version of Google Apps.
That was fast: it doesn’t work anymore. Google properly thought it was fun to show other peoples sales stats, but apparently didn’t like it to be used on stats of their own products.
Yvo
but it’s still showing sales. It hasn’t flat-lined completely. Still, could be a bug, we’ll find out soon enough I’d think.
The whole thing is down. Not even their examples are working.
@duncan: I get this error (on every search btw): “Your terms - google apps do not have enough search volume to show graphs”
odd, just checked again and I’m not getting it any errors. The price range needs to be set between $0 and $208 at the bottom, it might not be defaulting throwing up errors
never used it and don’t think I will for a long time.
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http://www.xenbet.com
mmmmhhhh. Google doesn’t want us to see that data!. Nice find and thanks for the graph. Now we still know
In October I bought the whole app package and saw no advantage compared to the free version and canceled immediately.
Maybe Google is shooting themselves in the foot by increasing the free space so much? For most people it doesn’t matter if they’ve got 6 or 25 GB mail accounts, and the ads in the free version is not a big problem. Give the paid accounts something extra, and the sales will raise againg. That could be better handling of attachments?
I’ve got the premium account because the free account were 2 GB at the time I purchased it and that was to small.
Take Gmail for example… why pay for Postini if you can use GMail as a free anti-spam filter?
At least for small companies, this hack is a good and free alternative.
My comment as actually referring to #9, I fully agree with Grinaldo!
Skeptical at first, now completely drinking the coolaid.
When I first saw writely I thought it was dumb dumb dumb.
We have just finished moving every process possible to Google docs (over word and excel).
- The lack for formatting features, now we see it as a benefit. Have you ever used the Format - ShowFormattingInUse feature in word? Every doc you get is a complete mess of formatting. And unless I am creating a print publication piece, all those “features” are in the way.
- We even use google docs for contracts now. We use to have a file structure customers/customer/contract_revA.doc, and in the process of negotiating a contract, would end up with revB revC…revN, what a mess. Plus all the emails to heave it back and forth. Now we just share it with the customer, all revs are stored automatically, we can diff, no email. We also export a PDF in case the customer does not like the collab stuff (no adobe $ required).
It’s weird at first, but not having this crap on my desktop and everyone else’s is liberating.
Great way to get businesses NOT to use Google Checkout.
It’s one thing if you’re looking for a broad market term, like “biker”, for instance. But it’s quite another when you’re searching under a trademarked item that almost certainly cannot be anything but that specific product (such as with “Google Apps”).
“Let’s show private sales data to anyone who wants to gain an unfair competitive edge over their competition, or ridicule them for what appears to be a total failure!” Ya, good idea…
The main target for Google Apps are SMBs. Enterprises already use Office and Sharepoint and are less likely to switch. So I agree with #9, right now there isn’t much incentive to pay Google for the Premium version. Google should cut down on the free storage and features in the free version if they want to make money from Apps. Of course that would be hard to do now that users expect these features for free.
Google makes most of it’s money off of ad sales. The free versions generate boatloads more money as advertising revenue generators then if they crippled them and tried to sell the uncrippled versions.
Plus the important thing to do when you already have more money then god is to build market share. The driblets made by selling apps don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the advantages of having market share.
I run a SMB and am a huge believer in Google Apps. I’m waiting for the rumoured Gears hookup in February so I can finally be free of the internet connection and the frequent “contacting google” messages when working on a spreadsheet. That’s something I would probably be willing to pay for, but again I think Google is going to concentrate on market share.
That and an email package that would let me handle large volumes of email more intelligently.
Google Apps customer service has improved, but 15 minute email replies and 24/7 telephone support are needed. Companies will pay for that. Also, JotSpot could turn the tide when released.
We absolutely love Google Apps. Best way to set up a new biz on the cheap.
I do think that this market isn’t mature yet and I hope that Zoho will be the market leader in this domain.
I don’t think there is a story here about Google Apps user adoption dropping off. There is a weekly cycle that suddenly drops to a lower level after one day. This is not some kind of market adoption phenomenon — the adoption rate wouldn’t change 4x in 24 hours unless there was some kind of news coverage of a disaster or something.
Something happened that rescaled the data. Perhaps the method changed, or they ran a special on the price, or the site was down. But a one day move is not consistent with the article’s “hmm, seems to becoming unpopular, doesn’t seem to be succeeding, let’s check back in a year” conclusion.
I’m 100% in agreement with Neil. We were completely sold on switching to Google Apps until we tried to get an intelligent response from them on their Postini integration.
We finally came to the conclusion that their lack of responsiveness (and when the DID respond, often they clearly didn’t know what they were talking about) made it way too risky for us to run our business on.
We ended up with a Postini subscription but email and IM from different companies.
Michael
I also agree with #9.
Google Apps is really about the future of computing. Google - remember, is a product organization, not a service one - that is why they have developed a partner program - there are people out there to help businesses set themselves up on Google Apps successfully:
http://www.google.com/enterpri.....vices.html
You can still see these results if you just search for “apps”… hope this helps
http://checkout.google.com/trends/results?q=apps