Oct 14, 2016

Apps for Work vs. Office

In the latest tech news, Google has recently retooled their Apps for Work office software in the hopes of gaining some market share in enterprise software applications for business.  Of course, Apple hopes to gain ground with their strategic IBM partnership and even Facebook is trying to get a foot in the door of the lucrative business market with their Facebook at Work application.

Along with a new name, "G Suite", for their Apps for Work software, Google is trying to gain interest from business users by infusing their software with more machine intelligence features.  Google expanded its use of artificial intelligence to make their Google Drive, Google Calendar and Google Sheets more intuitive to users.  For example, a new feature called, "Quick Access" will surface the files most relevant to a user at a given time based upon their calendar and interactions with other colleagues.

However, it is unlikely that Microsoft Office 365 is going away any time soon.  Microsoft has long dominated the market when it comes to document and spreadsheet software, and for good reason.  Office 365 is a mature product that has all the formatting functionality and advanced templates that business users still need in order to produce effective, accurate and well-written material.  Microsoft is keeping up with trends and infusing their software with machine learning features as well.  Microsoft recently introduced a "Tell Me" feature, which is a text field that allows for natural language searching.

Whether Google will eventually come to dominate office enterprise applications is anyone's guess, but in the meantime they are definitely facing an up-hill battle.  For more information on the latest tech news and trends and their potential impact on your organisation, sign-up to our weekly newsletter.