One more reason Microsoft Office will kill Google Docs

By Preston Gralla   http://blogs.computerworld.com

Here's one more reason Microsoft Office is killing Google Docs (now called Google Drive) in the battle of office suites: Google simply isn't serious about joining the fight, at least according to the New York Times. Microsoft is dead serious, and so Google Drive simply won't be able to compete.

The Times, in an article about Google's cloud-based service Google Compute Engine, has this to say about Google Drive:

The business version of Drive, its word processing, spreadsheet and storage service, was first introduced under a different name in 2007. It now has revenue of over $1 billion a year, but current and former executives have complained that it is a low priority inside the company because Google makes so much more money from consumer advertising.

At Microsoft, on the other hand, Office is an extremely high priority because of how important it is to the company's financial health. The Motley Fool reportsthat Office accounted for 29% of all of Microsoft's revenue in the 2013 fiscal year. Because of that, it's vital for Microsoft to continue to own the Office market. And it does. Gartner says that by the end of the year 630 million business users will be using Office, with 50 million of them using a cloud-based version. And by 2022, it says, 1.2 billion business users will use Office, with 696 million of them using a cloud-based version.

A Computerworld article backs up what the Times says, concluding that Google Apps is struggling to gain ground against Office, particularly in the enterprise. The article concludes that seven years after Google Apps (the enterprise version of Google Docs) was released:

Complacency has diluted [Google's] innovative spirit, and Google Apps now trails competing suites from IBM, Cisco and Microsoft in areas like enterprise social networking (ESN) and unified communications (UC).

And a recent Forrester Research study concluded that Microsoft Office 2010 is used in 85% of companies, Office 2007 by 51%, and Office 2003 by 28%. (Companies frequently use multiple versions of Office.) Google Docs, though, is used by a mere 13%.

Given all that, and that Google isn't fully serious about competing, Office will continue to dominate.