Two weeks ago, Google Labs announced new gadgets integrating Google Docs & Spreadsheets with GMail, just in time for the 2nd anniversary of the web-based productivity tools. The move may leverage GMail’s growing user base and facilitate growth at Docs & Spreadsheets as it inches closer to meaningful competition with MS Office, which dominates the productivity software market.
Microsoft came out defending its turf the next day with a slick demo of the new web-enabled Office 14, which offers live collaboration and online version control, but leaves day-to-day heavy lifting for the desktop. The counter-move may leverage Office’s widespread adoption and catapult Microsoft into leadership of the web productivity category too.
So, two years after launch, how is Google Docs & Spreadsheets doing?
Before we jump into the numbers it is important to note one key fact. A large number of visitors to Google Docs & Spreadsheets never make it past the marketing pages. For example, in September, 2008, only 58% of unique visitors to Google Docs & Spreadsheets actually used one of the available apps, templates or changed a setting. For this analysis to keep things simple we’re looking at the total set of users. If you’re interested in taking this deeper to the actual user group let us know.
Also, to provide a very rough comparison we compared Google Docs & Spreadsheet visitation to visitation levels on http://office.microsoft.com. Clearly this is only a very directional comparison as the sites really aren’t comparable. At the very least we do know that visitors to the office.microsoft.com sub-domain are probably MS Office users.
more:
http://blog.compete.com/2008/11/13/google-docs-spreadsheets-microsoft-office/
Microsoft came out defending its turf the next day with a slick demo of the new web-enabled Office 14, which offers live collaboration and online version control, but leaves day-to-day heavy lifting for the desktop. The counter-move may leverage Office’s widespread adoption and catapult Microsoft into leadership of the web productivity category too.
So, two years after launch, how is Google Docs & Spreadsheets doing?
Before we jump into the numbers it is important to note one key fact. A large number of visitors to Google Docs & Spreadsheets never make it past the marketing pages. For example, in September, 2008, only 58% of unique visitors to Google Docs & Spreadsheets actually used one of the available apps, templates or changed a setting. For this analysis to keep things simple we’re looking at the total set of users. If you’re interested in taking this deeper to the actual user group let us know.
Also, to provide a very rough comparison we compared Google Docs & Spreadsheet visitation to visitation levels on http://office.microsoft.com. Clearly this is only a very directional comparison as the sites really aren’t comparable. At the very least we do know that visitors to the office.microsoft.com sub-domain are probably MS Office users.
more:
http://blog.compete.com/2008/11/13/google-docs-spreadsheets-microsoft-office/
