Comments

• twitter

  2010-09-21 13:14:18

  Forbes has some nerve to claim the point of Google Apps is "to eat away at Microsoft's cash cow." Google's business model is advertising, so anything they can do to have people use their services is a money maker. If Microsoft's cash cow is dying, it's because keeping cows is a trivial exercise. Offering a spread sheet, presentation tool and text editor over the web is only a little less trivial than offering one natively. How long did Microsoft really expect to make big margins on their text editor? How long do they expect to remain in the OS business when there are litterally thousands of variants of gnu/Linux and BSD available at no cost? Microsoft's whole business model was a short lived abberation of the 90s and that the point of most of their current activity is to thwart competitors. Paper based publications like Forbes might have some sympathy for Microsoft as fellow dying publisher, but they should at least pretend to be objective in their sweeping comments.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-09-21 13:47:26

  I don't quite read it like this. I'm not sure Forbes was trying to daemonise Google.

• twitter

  2010-09-21 19:35:44

  There is no mistaking what they said, the intentions are harder to determine. They said straight up that Google's intention with Apps is to kill Microsoft revenue. That sounds like slander to normal people but perhaps not to Microsoft fans. They have taken the fact that Google Apps replaces Microsoft Office and threatens Microsoft's business model and turned it into less than charitable intentions on Google's part.
  
  Nick Saint's statement is his own or a spin of BI's already spun numbers and analysis. Saint points to a Business Insider article by Henry Bodget that reads like an advertisement for Microsoft Office but does not posit this motive to Google.
  
  Saint might think that anti-competitive behavior is normal and that no one really cares about customer demands. Forbes is a habitual apologist for Microsoft's crimes as "sharp business" practices.
  
  Saint and Blodget both still live in a universe where Microsoft is central and people only consider "alternatives" in order to get a better price on Microsoft trashware, which they think is best of class. If they are really in Microsoft's paid orbit, they will consistently ignore and damn all of Microsoft's competitors. Notice that neither mentions Open Office, ODF or the scores of other software that works to real standards. GNU/Linux is something Forbes only mentions when quoting Microsoft's periodic patent extortion threats.