Small business Googles

Since August of 2006, more than 100,000 small businesses created Google Home Pages as a company portal to Google applications like e-mail, Instant Messaging, and Docs & Spreadsheets, according to Kevin Gough, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google. While there are millions of small businesses in the U.S,. depending on your criteria, getting 100,000 new users in nine months or so sounds impressive.

Since August of 2006, more than 100,000 small businesses created Google Home Pages as a company portal to Google applications like e-mail, Instant Messaging, and Docs & Spreadsheets, according to Kevin Gough, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Google. While there are millions of small businesses in the U.S., depending on your criteria, getting 100,000 new users in nine months or so sounds impressive.

So why are people signing up for Google Home Pages and adopting Google Apps? Gough says it’s simple: “Business people already used search and e-mail in their personal lives, and we give choice without controls.” That name recognition gives Google a giant headstart against other Software-as-a-Service providers like HyperOffice, WebOffice, and InfoStreet.

Let’s be clear about who benefits from Google Apps, because most large businesses probably won’t use them. The April 16 edition of Network World included Travis Berkley’s review of Google Apps Premium, and he concluded the software needs more cooking for enterprise use. Travis is a smart guy, and I agree with his conclusions. But small businesses will benefit from Google Apps because their issues differ from their bigger brethren, and Google Apps provide some things quickly and easily that small businesses can’t do on their own.

When I speak with small and midsized businesses at the ITEC conferences, I often ask how many in the audience created a document in the last month or two using columns, headers, footers, or other advanced features found in Microsoft Word. Usually about 10% raise their hands. The rest of the attendees will find that Google Docs & Spreadsheets do more than they need. Add in the fact the applications don’t cost a penny, and you have a real winner. If you license the Premium edition for $50 per user per year, you still come out way ahead compared to buying a copy of Microsoft Office for that employee.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets offers a feature extremely difficult to replicate in Microsoft Office: Two or more people can edit a document at the same time and see their results immediately. Suddenly, working from home makes more sense for certain employees if they can collaborate with other employees using Google as the middleman, er, middle application.

Many big companies with deep pockets want this market. Microsoft, for one, keeps promising us something new. But Google’s well-earned reputation for reliability is actually baked right into the Premium version contract, where Google guarantees 99.9% uptime. Many people look upon Microsoft’s uptime guarantees, whether hosted services or desktop applications, with a huge amount of dubiosity. Google offers a free or inexpensive alternative to major Microsoft Office applications.

Large groups, like the University of Arizona (65,000 students) and countries such as Kenya and Ruwanda (I’m assuming the governments, not every person in each country) make Google Apps and Home Pages their default start page and application set. It’s a good thing Google Mail already supports 40 languages, far more than most competitors. Google Docs & Spreadsheets supports 14 languages.

Google offers easy answers to tough problems small businesses face, mainly remote data access, collaboration options, and data protection. If you have Internet access you have Google, and collaboration with Google Apps and Calendars mean people can work without worrying about buying a collaboration platform.

Keeping data on Google makes sense as a backup option because Google allows each user 50GBs of storage under the Premium plan, but free users have no set storage limit currently. That will probably change, but the lowest Google could cut your storage would realistically be the size of your G-Mail storage, and that’s almost 3GBs per user right now.

Of course, Google might argue whether Google Apps, including Docs & Spreadsheets, can support a large organization or not. Gough says the 10,000 Google employees using Google Apps as their primary office productivity suite provide plenty of new feature suggestions and improvement demands. Not willing to commit, Gough agreed that presentation software (like PowerPoint) and project management tools come up constantly in new product discussions within Google. The fact that General Electric and Proctor & Gamble, just to name two big companies, can rely on Google Apps seems to indicate scalability won’t be a problem in the near or long term.

Small companies often bypass online data storage options because of worries about security and not being able to directly control that storage, but Gough believes he can persuade them to trust the Big G. In fact, you’ll have to back up data in reverse by downloading all your files to local storage for backup, rather than sending them the other direction.

Start-up cost is one penalty faced by small businesses when buying advanced applications, because companies must overspend relative to their size to get high end features. Google Apps does away with that cost. They don’t have everything covered, and I wish Google believed in storage with folders holding sub-folders, but Google offers quite a bit for little or nothing.

It’s not just search any longer. Google can now lay claim to being the core application suite that makes remote employees a distributed and collaborative work force rather than just a bunch of people working at home.