Google is eating Microsoft’s lunch, one tasty bite at a time

[pneill]

Interesting, but I'm not sure it's meaningful. Consider the following.

1) Their sample data is based on your product usage and people who use rescue time are probably heavy cloud users. So population set is unfairly waited toward the cloud.

2) Microsoft's get's the majority of their users and revenue from enterprise level sales. Google customer on the other hand is primarily the consumer and small business. This is important because in most enterprise level environments users can't install an application like rescue time.

3) Lastly people double dip - at work use outlook for work and gmail for personal.

It would interesting to just look at productivity apps like word processing or presentation with referrer values from .com addresses only (not logins) . The trending might be very different.

[nostrademons]

I also figured that their data is biased, but the interesting part is that the trend line goes counter to that bias. Say that RescueTime is heavily used by early adopters that are comfortable with cloud-based services, the same people that are likely to use Google Apps. In the beginning, you'd expect that to bias the results toward Google. But as RescueTime broadens toward mainstream appeal - which is already happening, I was an early adopter but then dropped it when it got too corporate - you'd expect Google's market share to drop, as RescueTime's share expanded to include more Microsoft users. Instead, you see the opposite, where Google's share is growing even though the population of RescueTime users is expanding into domains typically held by Microsoft.

[montanalow]

Our users may include more tech savvy early adopters than the general population, but capturing that audience is how tech markets are won. This makes our data more relevant as a leading indicator, not less. If you are a major software vendor, and you lose the early adopters, you should be worried.

[stcredzero]

Isn't the consumer and small business often a bellwether to what happens in the enterprise?

[barredo]

> Microsoft's get's the majority of their users and revenue from enterprise level sales

And goverments and public institutions around the world

[daleharvey]

heh rescuetime have had a string of really interesting blog posts, and without fail almost every comment from hacker news has been complaining about skew and bias.

rescuetime can only provide this level of insight for people that use their software, and that will incur a bias, thats fairly obvious and should go without saying, or at least repeating constantly.

Cheers guys for some really interesting blog posts, some of us appreciate them.

[dasil003]

Yeah it's interesting, and yeah I think the trend is meaningful.

However I disagree that they can go without mentioning the sample bias, especially in this case of corporate vs cloud apps. Yes to HN readers (a lot of whom are working on cloud startups) it's obvious. However to the wider community of people who might be reading that blog, that is not necessarily obvious.

[mattmaroon]

This positively reeks of sample bias. Interesting and misleading is a deadly combination.

[brown9-2]

I think this is an interesting analysis, and as others have pointed out, it's unfair to complain that RescueTime user's are representative - the only thing RescueTime can comment on is what their user's are using.

However I think it is slightly misleading to include "Gmail" under the umbrella of "Google Apps" when comparing them to Microsoft Office. It would be fairer to only include the individual Google Docs apps compared to what is included in Microsoft Office.

Many Microsoft Office users might be using Gmail for personal mail simultaneously while not using any other Google Docs products.

However most users of Google Docs are likely not also using Outlook (in isolation of the other Office apps) for their email.

[wvenable]

More and more users are being exposed to working with online software due to Gmail. If they compare it with Outlook, they might even find it superior. That does make it easier to sell people on the idea of Google apps.

[mahmud]

RescueTime's user-base is hardly representative. They're very computer savvy, avid social-media participants and care about their work and productivity improvements enough to get an application for it. A very low, one-digit percentile of computer users.

I would trust this data if it came from an anti-virus vendor, Skype, or any other application with a huge and diverse installation base.

[BrandonWatson]

While this is great data, can you include some data about the makeup of the sample pool? Specifically, I am wondering how much of a conclusion you can draw about worldwide, or even US broadly, versus what could potentially be very a highly technically adept audience, thus skewing one way or another.

[pierrefar]

Exactly. Someone using Rescue Time is not your typical mainstream Microsoft user.

So yes, sure, there is a segment in the market that Google is winning.

[Revisor]

This is an arrogant post ignoring the skew towards technical users and users of cloud applications (which Rescuetime and Google Docs both are), similar to the way the Alexa results used to be skewed.

What bothers me is not the dumb post, but the fact that the author doesn't even try to explain the difference and apparently people behind Rescuetime defend the post here at HN as if it was real research.

No trend can be read out of this data.

[seshagiric]

I am using Office 2010 since last two months and I think it is solid. In fact use a non-IE browser to try the online versions from office.live.com. Try OneNote. Despite the article I do not think Google docs compares that well.

[nopinsight]

All graphs end around December 2009. I wish they have included more recent data in the charts.

[arvinjoar]

Excerpt from http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html :

"11. Web Office apps. We're interested in funding anyone competing with Microsoft desktop software. Obviously this is a rich market, considering how much Microsoft makes from it. A startup that made a tenth as much would be very happy. And a startup that takes on such a project will be helped along by Microsoft itself, who between their increasingly bureaucratic culture and their desire to protect existing desktop revenues will probably do a bad job of building web-based Office variants themselves. Before you try to start a startup doing this, however, you should be prepared to explain why existing web-based Office alternatives haven't taken the world by storm, and how you're going to beat that."

Relevant? I think so.

[huherto]

Could it be that the market intelligence RescueTime is gathering is more valuable than what individual users are getting? I can really see the big guys (MS,Google et al) providing similar tools just to be able to see this info. Specially MS since they can just put it in their O.S.

[panacea]

> [E]specially MS since they can just put it in their O.S.

Wouldn't that generate a shitstorm of criticism for monitoring users, or do you mean some sort of opt-in protocol?

[chaosmachine]

The major problem I see here is you're measuring "Time Spent" (in the 3rd graph, at least). If a product is really innovative, it should take up less of the user's time, not more.

If Outlook suddenly became twice as efficient, you'd expect to see "Time Spent" decreasing.

[Splines]

Only if the number of things that you used to do was fixed. Adding features and increasing performance could possible cancel out, timewise.

That said, I think determining the utility of a product from the amount of time spent in it is a very difficult thing to do. Deriving utility from time spent, and then comparing it between products seems very nebulous at best.

Personally, I'm fine with RescueTime's presentation of the graph here. In the end, eyeballs are eyeballs. I don't know if you could generate a metric (from RescueTime, anyway) that could measure product innovation.

[BoppreH]

Tell me, why is Microsoft Word in the same graph as Google Mail?

You claim to compare the Office suite to Google Apps, but I don't think GMail and Outlook are included in those categories.

[Ionic_Walrus]

its all hunky dory in the echo chamber

[jsz0]

Even though I do use a bunch of different cloud services I still have a mail client and a bunch of spreadsheets open at any given time. It's still the most practical way for me to get work done. I'm not even an Office power-user but I find Google Docs to be lacking some features that were available to me with MS Office running on Windows 3.1. I can't justify that type of downgrade just to save myself a few minutes of work saving, sharing or retrieving a file in a less convenient way.

[stoney]

I guess this is to do with the sample of users, but I'm very surprised at how low PowerPoint comes out - more or less 0% of users use it? Given how often I have to suffer through one of those presentations I'd have expected more.

I'd also have expected Word to come higher (it's shown as something like 2-3% of users) given that most professionals probably use it to write a report from time to time.

[JoeAltmaier]

What lunch? Free apps? How is that important?

[matrix]

The initial graph is misleading in a fundamental way: the usage of most of the Microsoft Office apps has barely changed - this is really an Outlook -vs- Gmail story, the results of which are no surprise to any of us.

[jheitzeb]

Take this with a grain of salt, but I'd imagine that RescueTime's users are early-adopters, and as such may be the tip of the arrow indicating future trends. Hence, this is fairly interesting data.

[vln]

I don't see Google Spreadsheet eating Excel's lunch anytime soon.

[derwiki]

Depends on what you're using it for. I plan a lot of big group trips, and coordinating logistics with Google Spreadsheet has been a lifesaver.

[ananthrk]

Interesting analysis. It would be interesting to track this after we give some time for web-based Office 2010 to catch up.