Google is planning to take Microsoft head on by killing its core business: the enterprise Office apps. Google’s Rajen Sheth, who is the product manager at the team dedicated to build Enterprise level apps thinks that in the past, when Google launched Google Docs, analyst were skeptical about its success. But 10 years have proved that Google not only contains the potential to limit Microsoft’s penetration in the enterprise domain, it can also undo its impact.
In an interview to Business Insider, Google for Work manager Amit Singh said that Google has a complete business plan to knock out Microsoft out of its primary turf. Google’s Cloud based docs suite of apps has the edge over Microsoft in terms of collaborative work, which is the primary need of the modern world. Although Microsoft has given OneDrive and DropBox integration in its latest Office for Windows 10 apps, people feel much comfortable using Google Docs.
Singh said that Google is garnering the customer base of Microsoft by harnessing the core features of Office in its Cloud based apps. Google’s analysis has shown that most of the people use Google Docs for light editing, reading and sharing. No one uses Google spreadsheet for heavy report making or invoicing. This is the area where Google lacks but Singh doesn’t care about this. He thinks that if Google is able to get to 90% of the user base of Microsoft, the rest will follow.
Microsoft acquired QuickOffice, a software which can open Microsoft Office documents. This move was to deplete Office penetration. How? Most of the users make their documents in office and when they share or work on them in a collaborative environment, they open them on Google Docs if Office is not installed on the device. Google Docs cannot open an Office document, but now that is possible with QuickOffice.
Next comes the pricing model. Microsoft works in a licensing model, which is costly as compared to Google apps. Google has no plans to convince the Enterprise to dump office and buy Google apps for work. They are cutting the costs and showing the performance, which will imbibe the companies sooner or later towards Google apps.