If you’re short on time, here’s the punchline – buying an unlocked Google Nexus One is horrible because neither Google nor T-Mobile can get you up and running quickly unless you know what to ask. If you want this phone, just get a contract and be done with it – the two companies haven’t figured out how to support users who come in with a device in hand. Here’s my saga in a few steps:

1. Ordered Google Nexus One unlocked from the online store.
2. Went into T-Mobile and got offered a FlexPay plan – no monthly contract and plenty of options for unlimited or metered voice, text, and Internet.
3. After a few clicks, I had everything up and running – Gmail, Google Calendar, and all of the other core services tied to my Google account. So far so good.

And then I got to Google Voice. Everything went fine until I went to set up my voicemail. All I wanted to do was to forward my voicemail from the Nexus One to my Google Voice number using conditional forwarding. The helper wizard on the device couldn’t make it work. The directions available on the Google Voice site didn’t work. So I picked up the phone and called T-Mobile. They were very pleasant, kind, and helpful, even though they regularly admitted they didn’t know much about the device.

I read the T-Mobile forums prior to the call and a lot of users suggested that you can’t actually do conditional voicemail forwarding if you’re on a FlexPay plan – they simply don’t allow you to do so. I broght this point up repeatedly during my roughly 1 hour call with their support folks. Finally, after some patient work by a Tier 3 unsupported deice rep, we both figured it out – it’s my plan, not the device. After about 30 minutes with the billing department, who kept trying to get me back to technical support, I finally just gave up and told them I wanted to cancel my account. It turns out there actually isn’t a way to convert from a FlexPay month-to-month plan to a postpaid account. And here’s the kicker – even if you bring your own device, signing up for a postpaid account obligates you to sign up for a contract. I don’t mind signing up for a contract if you’re subsidizing my device. But if I’m bringing my own phone, I find that to be a bit insulting.

So now I have this Nexus One and can’t use it seamlessly with Google Voice. It’s a phone, right? This should be a device that showcases how awesome Google Voice is, right? So what I’ve concluded is that buying an unlocked Nexus One is about the worst decision you could make for three reasons:

1. You pay more – the device costs almost $600
2. If you want to be able to use Google Voice to do everything, including voicemail, you need a contract as well.
3. Nobody seems to be able to support the unlocked version of the device and you’ll pull your hair out trying to get help.

Fixing this would be easy. Either Google or T-Mobile could simply direct people who want the unlocked device toward a plan that will actually allow someone to fully enjoy the device and provide a bit more support for those of us who want to get the device up and running quickly.

Overall, I can see the promise in this device. If you’re a power user of Google Apps, this phone is great. But I think I’ll sit this round out and wait until the support and setup issues get resolved before committing to this device.

Gates to Google: “Your business applications stink” | The Open Road – The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay – CNET Blogs

(Disclaimer – I’m a former Googler and have been using Google products for productivity and personal purposes for over 2 years.)

Matt Asay, who does a good job covering open source developments, has a short piece where Gates points out the flaws in Google’s web-based productivity suite.

If Google ends up getting meaningful market share in this space (and I believe they will), this will go down as one of those quotes you see in a future version of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” – it’s just classic. This is my favorite pull quote:

“If you’ve seen … the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things, they really don’t have the richness the responsiveness. You can see that relative [to] the success they have had there. Most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day and then after that ..”

At the end of the day, Google Apps do not compare favorably to Microsoft Office apps on a head-to-head basis. And it’s likely to stay that way for some time given the richness available from Microsoft’s desktop products. Microsoft has built an ecosystem around Office and many people depend on it every day.

This reminds me a lot of the kinds of comments I heard about web-based email and mobile phones when they were relatively new concepts. My mobile phone is just now beginning to approach the reliability of my landline phone. Somehow mobile phones have managed to grow nonetheless. The reason is simple -for some use cases, the new technology far outshines the previous alternative and renders comparisons meaningless.

The real compelling use case for Google Apps is distributed collaboration. They really shine in a situation where a distributed group is trying to share information or iteratively update a group project. It’s also a great solution for small businesses who don’t want to or can’t afford to implement a full Exchange environment with Office on every desktop.

If Gates’ focus is on penetration among customers who value richness, Microsoft will get blindsided by Google Apps. Google Apps’ existing adopters are people who value the online collaborative elements over the depth of functionality offered by desktop alternatives. If Google does things correctly and continues to both add in popular features from MS Office and do things that simply can’t be done in an isolated desktop environment (like real-time collaboration on the same document where you can both see changes as they’re made, a common spreadsheet that everyone can work on simultaneously, etc), the Apps suite will become “good enough” for a larger number of users.

By the time Google Apps show up AND (and the AND in caps is intentional) are heavily used at major Microsoft houses, it will be too late for Microsoft to do anything about it – Google will have gotten there by improving the Apps suite until it matches the functionality that Office provides.

Aside from the ability to learn about what major enterprises need to have before they’ll flip the switch to web-based apps and the chance to land a few marquee accounts, I don’t see much value in pitching large, entrenched Microsoft houses today. I don’t believe there are a lot of large businesses out there ready to make the wholesale switch today.  There is a much larger opportunity for Google to go after people who don’t yet have a solution (new businesses, web-based SMBs) than to try to convert Microsoft users who have solutions that are more feature rich.

Aside from barking up the large enterprise tree, the real danger I see for Google is focusing too much on MS Office parity. At the end of the day, I’m of the mind that time is better spent building out features and functions that you can’t do on the desktop than simply trying to duplicate every feature in Office.

Last thing, life outside of Google has taught me that there are a lot of people who have really optimized their work around the use of MS Office desktop apps. They don’t “trust” cloud-based apps for their work any more than early mobile phone adopters would have lived without a landline as backup. Getting meaningful usage of Google Apps is going to be tougher than simply getting sales and closing deals – employees are going to have to get comfortable with the tools and see them as a better way to get their jobs done than the status quo.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: google, googleapps, microsoft, office20, enterprise

Is it just me or does there seem to be a subtle (or not-so-subtle) recasting of web office suites to be less about new functionality and feature differentiation and more focus on the price differential versus Microsoft Office? Early in the web office discussion, it seemed to me that there was a lot more conversation about the benefits of using web-apps (no VPNs, universal accessibility, easier to manage and deploy, etc) versus traditional desktop applications. Repositioning the conversation around price comparisons is a shift, it seems – there are certainly folks for whom price is the major impediment but this recasting strikes me as an admission of how far the industry has to go to reach real competitive parity.

Also, it’s important to note that some of these “disenfranchised” folks who do not have desktop productivity applications on their computer don’t need them. If you are in a task-oriented job where you enter data into a system, you might as well have a terminal as opposed to a full-fledged PC. Why would you need access to spreadsheets, word processing, and email?

More than revenue and sales, this partnership could give Google much more insight into what corporate IT folks need to see out of Google Apps for Enterprise before they start writing checks. It’s worth noting that Google has one major touchpoint with enterprise IT folks today and that’s the Google Search Appliance. The folks who are managing online advertising spend are likely not the same folks who make IT infrastructure decisions. Working with a large system integrator is a good way for Google to get a handle on the key requirements they’ll need to address to make GAFE a more palatable product for larger organizations. I also wonder if spending more time with the guys over at Salesforce.com might not also be the answer – those guys seemed to have cracked this nut before and I bet they’d be willing to share parts of the playbook.

From my experience, many employees struggle to use the tools that they have at their disposal today – adding more tools in might just make life more complicated. I’m sorry, but the whole “Team Productivity” moniker just sounds weird to me. I’ve worked at a handful of places and in almost every case I’ve seen employees befuddled by the full range of things you can do with the existing tools at their disposal. Adding in a new layer of tools and interfaces to learn when the existing products aren’t being fully utilized today might make life harder (as opposed to easier) than it is today. The history of groupware and group-oriented productivity applications has shown that it’s a tough nut to crack. Often times, the individual must find a way to be productive before he/she can worry about improving the productivity of the whole.

All in all, it’s an interesting announcement. I expect it will generate modest amounts of sales for both parties but will help Google get smarter about how to sell, develop, and position their product for a more sophisticated audience.