Google Sites: What's all the fuss?
The launch of Google Sites is like the opening of a movie or play. The critics (including myself) feast on it, churning out copy and opinions as to whether Google Sites is a Microsoft SharePoint killer or merely the McDonald's of wikis, with more nutritional value than the venerable fast food burger and no cost.
Dennis Howlett wasn't impressed. On his ZDNet blog he wrote:
After 16 months at Google developer's hands, the outcome is substandard. This is such a pity. In its JotSpot incarnation, it was far from perfect but that didn't matter because JotSpot was shedding light on a new way of collaborating. Since passing into Google's hands, the guts have been ripped out and then re-assembled with as much Google 'stuff' as they could cram in but rushed to completion.
At the very least, Google should get rid of the gadgets addition facility and rework it. Otherwise, I sense the SMBs at which it is aimed will find the service a turn off.
I'm don't think the guts were ripped out, but JotSpot was given the Google makeover, which is rooted in the way founders Brin and Page think about Web applications. Like Google search, the interface is extremely simple. No boiling the ocean with features no one can comprehend. Dennis pointed to slowness in integrating Google gadgets in Sites and a lack of business-oriented widgets. Maybe Google should have added "beta" to the Sites label. Gmail is still in beta after several years of gestation.
Zoli Erdos sums it up well:
Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release.
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Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.
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Observing this small nightmare I have come to the conclusion that with all whiz bang Adobe and Microsoft and Google are delivering, the weakest link in the chain is some programming error on these companies' behalf which will shut down your business until Google and others decide in their wisdom to correct it.
If your business (or charity) depends on it - think twice before putting it into the hands of a free service.
This is one of the reasons PBwiki offers both free and paid services. Some people aren't concerned with polish and support, and for those people, a free service is perfectly appropriate.
On the other hand, PBwiki has thousands of paying customers, including Facebook, Symantec, DePaul University, and the FDA. They're willing to pay for support, reliability, and functionality.
Hotmail has been below par for some years now, even without the Gmail comparison. Either they step up or get considered sub-standard..
I don't mean to say that it's bad software. In the right hands it can be useful. My point is more that it's a product of years of feature requests made by complex organizations, and built by Microsoft. When purchased it brings that entire legacy with it. I personally prefer simple inexpensive solutions to communication problems, and Google does a pretty good job of providing simple and inexpensive.
Oh yeah, your organization doesn't need to go through a six month RFP process if the application is FREE.
"" One-stop sharing for team information ""
perpetual beta is perpetual cya
Dennis was spot on as far as 'the guts being ripped out'. As someone who has a friend at Google the story behind Google Sites is worse than you can imagine. Buy a company, take a product off the market for 16 months, give the existing JotSpot user community crappy service so that you can... rewrite the entire backend in Java.
Yep. That's what the 16 months were for. God forbid that we leave the current stuff in place while we migrate to Google's Java infrastructure. JotSpot's backend was originally written in another web technology, but that wasn't good enough for the Computer Scientists over at Google, so we have to rewrite it all in Java. Now. Without pause. God forbid that its not in the One True Technology - Java!!!
Then relaunch it with:
- Less features than the original...
- The standard Google "so simplified that its barely usable" user interface...
- A bunch of widgets and other crap that no one wanted...
Sites is just another example of a company that is so stunningly unprepared for what it really takes to do "boring business applications" that its laughable. I wouldn't put any content into this thing to save my soul, especially if you are a business user.
This reminds me of the stories I've been hearing about Google Docs where someone at a company puts company proprietary information into Google Docs and then leaves the company. When other company employees try to get access to the information, they have to call or email support at Google and then pray that someone there can forward username/password information so that this company can get access to its *own data*. No forethought was put into having 'authorized company contacts' or any of that before the service was launched.
Another poster here was right. This is the Google Way. Keep a product endlessly in beta because otherwise you might actually have to do... *customer service* and *support* and all of the things that a business user needs. There's only one thing a business user cares about: running his business. He doesn't care a wit for what backend technology is being used.
Now, if you were a geek at Google, sipping your free Goocino, sitting on your Goochair, eating your free Goofood, driving around your Prius that the company helped pay for and getting your technical jollies off on the next new thing that you're planning to ship the 0.0.0.0.66 version of (and that you never have any plans to finish out to a 1.0 Final either because then you might actually have to *support* it), that business stuff sounds awfully boring, doesn't it?
This is just a variation on the 'open source copout': "I'll give it away for free and then I don't have any obligation to support it because its free and support/customer service is boring and I want to go hack on the next new great thing".
I'm an open source developer and have made years worth of development effort available 'for free', but I don't imagine that that absolves me of responsibility to do a high-quality product and support it the best I can. My name is attached to it.
Yet another in a long list of 'interesting projects' from Google...
DF
Of course the folks here at PBwiki prefer our own product...along with thousands of other paying customers.
Google is trying to set itself up in opposition to SharePoint (a good idea--SharePoint is widely used, but little loved)... It's low risk (though some of those reviews must have hurt). Google can see if people are willing to flock to its banner. If not, they can bury it just like so many other previous projects.
The gadgets thing really is poor. Get rid of that and re-engineer and maybe it could do well - I hope it does for general competitive reasons. But there is no excuse to put out 'stuff' that is substandard. It is exactly the kind of thing that puts end users off.
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by pearlbluevtx
March 1, 2008 9:34 AM PST
- We are a SMB and 2 out of 4-5 employees have been in the IT world for a few years but not our focus any longer. I can tell you from running/sysadmin multiple servers in data centers and e-mail/web servers etc that Google Apps are a good solution for SMB depending on what that SMB needs are. We need good e-mail, everywhere access, docs is secondary but USED and helpful. We still use Office for our main office needs but Docs let's us share ideas, xls, docs etc and it's easy to do. Gmail is our main use and it has been really wonderful. I have some ex-clients that I moved over to G-Apps and they have been really surprised out how well it has all worked out. I pay for the "Premium" service - don't have too but I do - and I've used their tech support once and it was fine. I'm sure Google isn't perfect ... no companies are. The SITES deal - seems fine to me... we'll probably use it for a few things but it will be because it's easy to get to, use and able to share with our staff. Again, we're small but G-Apps has been one of the best decisions - mainly for e-mail - that I made. ThinkFree / MS / Etc ... even Yahoo - their e-mail solutions aren't good for me and Think doesn't offer it that I see. Look at ThinkFree too - they say "beta" as well.
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