* More on our Google study
As mentioned in an earlier newsletter, we conducted a study of organizations to determine the likelihood of adopting Google productivity applications, Google’s e-mail offerings, etc. This was an internally funded study, not sponsored by any particular vendor.
We split the data into small and midsized business (SMBs / up to 1,000 employees) and enterprises. We found, without any surprise whatsoever, that Microsoft Office is the dominant platform for desktop productivity applications with 91% and 94% share of the SMB and enterprise market, respectively. We also found that Google Apps has a miniscule market share, but it’s about the same for both SMBs and enterprises. However, SMBs were several times more likely to use an alternative to either Office or Apps.
Another question that we asked focused on the likelihood of using Google’s e-mail offerings with a corporate domain (not Google’s domains) for a variety of user groups: employees who work at a desk much of the time, employees who are away from the office frequently and teleworkers or other employees who work at home much of the time.
It was the latter question that provided some surprises. We would expect enterprises to be less open to the idea of using GMail for these employee groups and that is what we found — 67% of enterprises told us they would never consider GMail vs. 61% of SMBs. However, opinions among enterprises were stronger on either side of this argument than they were in the SMB space. For example, while 4% of SMBs told us they’d definitely deploy GMail for these groups, 11% of enterprises said they’d definitely do so. In other words, opinions to use or not use GMail were stronger among enterprises, whereas a lot more SMBs were somewhere in the middle on the issue.
Overall, this is pretty good news for Google or for other alternative vendors.
