Figures show Google Gmail and Docs destroying Outlook's market share. Next victim: Excel

I calculate that 70% of the Word and Excel documents I work with are created and maintained using Google Apps.

i calculate that you guys have some serious blinders on. I think it's pretty convenient that they include gmail and docs into one study. I would not doubt that the vast majority of tech savvy users have gmail in their world somewhere but you are drinking some strong Kool-Aid if you think google docs is going to supplant MS Office.... ever. It's the same Open Source war cry that's been screamed since the beginning, that somehow Linux is going to take over. Apple is the best example of how much extra users are willing to pay for something that 'just works'. As an IT person that works in a large corporate environment I cannot imagine implementing a product that has no real support to back it up.

This survey only provides information from users "allowed" to install the RescueTime tool. This means that the stats are definately stilted to home users or non-corporate controlled users many of which are active Office users. Statistics inappropriately promoted are a danger.

Will this misinformed and click-bait post be removed by DLS, or will they just let it drift into obscurity like a stale fart? Only time will tell...

Okay, how is being biased a good thing?

@ Jeff: Unless I misunderstand your critique, Office incorporates Outlook. Why is it surprising for Google Apps to include Gmail (in the chart)? As for Office _never_ being supplanted by Google Docs, I think that's a hasty prediction. Look at Xerox and the GUI, look at newspapers, look at AOL (sorry DLS), look at (the trends) Internet Explorer. Sometimes, the sleeping giants really mess up or they really miss the boat: I think at a minimum, MS's missed the boat on cloud computing in the consumer sector.

On the whole, I believe users (like Yours Truly) are fed up with MS being (basically) the only option out there, full of "meh," and full of OS annoyances (bugs, updates, security screens, bloatedness etc.). The cloud changes that.

Why couldn't Linux and Apple make such apocalyptic inroads, you ask? Because they didn't have a completely new platform that wasn't already dominated by MS (kudos to MS on achieving this). Oh, and when did Linux ever have the financial resources of Google? Google's also the world's most valuable brand - does that mean anything in a new era of an uncharted, emerging technology?

Finally, Google is the one (now the reverse of MS) who virtually owns the online space. Yes, their market share (about 80% right now) isn't as high as MS's is in OS (about 90%), but the company's a flippin verb! I don't think it's outlandish to say it, but many people equate Google with the Internet. On a new platform (the Internet), in a world where it essentially predominates, and when people are fed up with the "evil empire," and the status quo . . . I give MS another three to eight years (at most) at the top of productivity suites (but Google Docs might not be the 90% champion or anything, most likely a large plurality).

@Mike: Well said, but Sebastin does have a point that it's a striking trend.

@Tech Introvert: Seriously, if you're so aghast, take one minute to point out why . . . You already took the time to comment, what's another thirty seconds?

@Sanskrit: Because it's not meant to be an overall sample of the general population, but of users who are trend-setters.

@Sebastin: I think this article also has some intriguing figures: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/06/techview_future_operating_systems

80% of American Windows users are still on XP (nine years old!) and half of them are on SP2 and not SP3.

Tons of users figure that what they've got is good enough. Most Americans aren't the MS "power users" who are "on a mission" (to get free software/hardware from MS): http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20007764-56.html

I think due to Google's amazingly successful brand and the inroads its made with consumers (as opposed to MS - which users accept because there's basically no other choice, thus why they don't upgrade), a lot of that 80% will one day perhaps trade in their XP for Chrome OS. If they spend most of their time online and Google's the number one brand, overall, in the world, it's not exactly a Linux alternative . . . (even if, underneath, it really is).

Phew! Must be Friday afternoon.

"Next victim - Excel"? Really? Have you ever used excel the way it is used in large organizations? If you have ever worked in a large corporate bureaucracy - you'd know MS is safe for atleast another 5-10 years before any real change is made in terms to switching to over rated G-apps from real work horses such as Excel and Outlook. Trendsetters have been trying to set trends with OO for years but, without success.
Those who think google can just code everything in browser are drinking kool-aid. If google were to code only 25% of the functions provided by excel in their webapps - it would take a minute for the webpage to load. Heavy clients such as excel are not going away anytime soon. It is likely that the data will be loaded back into the cloud but, the shell would still remain on the client side.

Indeed. Quite a bit of this, article and commentary, seems to be little more than the same old rallying cry of "The Fall of Micro$oft is Nigh!!!". But neither Google nor Open Office is anywhere close to overtaking MS Office. Further, I would have thought that DLSquad would be more aware than most internet organizations that the Cloud will never - despite Google's fervent hopes - supplant the desktop entirely. Further, I am flat-out shocked at the number of people who seem to have suddenly taken the notion that we should re-implement every application in an on-demand-load interpreted language in a third-party application and use that as a replacement. If you compare them side-by-side, the responsiveness of webapps is utterly pathetic, even in the fastest browsers, compared to the desktop versions, and frequently with less than half the features. Compound that with some serious work that Microsoft has been doing lately to improve Office, and I think that reports of the death of the desktop are greatly exaggerated.

Don't worry, both RescueTime and I are well aware that these numbers are biased -- but in a good way. With these numbers coming from a tool used primarily by those trying to boost productivity, these numbers are a leading indicator.

>>>

There are so many things wrong with this statement that it blows my mind. Why, in any way, would this be considered a "leading indicator"? That literally has no basis in fact. At least none that you cared to share with the group. You don't reference anything that proves that people interested in "boosting productivity" are a leading indicator of a single thing. I mean I know that the company told you that the bias was "good" but did you apply even a small amount of thought to whether or not that was the case? What if they people who like to spend time staring at rescue time's neat graphs just like to try new things? You could just as rationally argue that Office users already feel productive so they don't need to install applications that spy on their use.

Even if the bias was an indicator of anything, what percentage of users have rescue time installed? They have a nebulous claim of "hundreds of thousands" but interestingly, the company has 697 Twitter followers and its firefox extension has been downloaded all of 4,805 times. I don't know, doesn't seem like a lot of reach to me. Do people interested in productivity not use use Twitter or Firefox? Given that there are hundreds of millions of PCs (what do you think? at least 10 M of those are interested in "boosting productivity") in the world all this doesn't seem like a very healthy sample size even within the cutting edge.

So who are these people with such insight into the world of tomorrow? Well, the press page references "mentions" in dozens of famous publications but doesn't link to them instead we have links to people like "Frank Gilroy, Software Engineer" - whose site is currently under construction thank you very much! In reality they actually seem like an also ran within the "boosting productivity" world. Their primary business seems to be getting comical fluff press and encouraging hapless bloggers to embarrass themselves with outlandish headlines and poorly sourced (but helpfully branded!) data.

Hey Google Apps are great and do present a challenge to MS but this post is just a horror show.

>Granted -- but look at the TREND!

Oh well, that changes everything! A trend, once presented, must be valid!

Ah yes, a reply as thoughtful as your original post.