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Google Apps brings families together by Office 365 Team, on December 16, 2014 | 0 Comments | 1 Shares

Tim Carroll is a senior product manager on the Office 365 team. My Knucklehead Son doesn’t want to go to college. No, instead he wants to wander around the country in a Volkswagen camper van, posting his adventures on YouTube for legions of adoring fans, pausing just long enough to cup his hands under a gushing spigot of money piped in by grateful advertisers. I tell him he sounds like Google. I’m a cranky old coot, already, and Yes, I’m determined to crush his tender young dreams. I tell my Knucklehead Son that the best things in life are worth working for, that nothing good ever comes for free, and that knowledge is its own reward. I tell him there will always be the easy way and the right way, short-term answers versus enduring ones, and new experiments trying to challenge time-tested solutions. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of avoiding the expense of four more years of structured education and emotional coddling is not without its allure, but I tell my Knucklehead Son it’ll be a minor miracle if he ever gets past his foreign language requirement and graduates from High School in the first place. Of course, he thinks he’s got that one all figured out too: he’s taking sign

language. Why? It’s the easiest offering. Not because he’s devoted to improving communication with deaf people, or revolutionizing Kabuki theatre for them as a crucial audience segment of his nonexistent YouTube channel, or even because now he can silently cuss me out, grinning, with five different hand-fluttering gestures that make the basic middle finger salute look starkly inadequate, no, my boy is taking sign language because it’s easy. Which brings us back to Google. What’ve I got against Google? Nothing. Not Google at large, the company itself is pretty great in a lot of ways, but Google Apps for work, yeah, I take issue there: I’m philosophically opposed to mediocrity. So I sit my boy down at his laptop to demonstrate the difference between Google Apps and Office 365. Naturally, we’re less than 30 seconds into it before he interrupts, saying, “Oh heck no, I hate this Google program, we have to use it at school and it always screws up my PowerPoint presentations!” “Ah yes,” I say (nodding sagely, withholding my pedantic wisdom for a moment), “Google Apps has file fidelity issues when you want to work on Office documents—but they’re trying hard to fix that now, they are getting better. The real issue is, if you think of these Apps as tools you need to do your job, these ones just aren’t nearly good enough—how’re you going to build a house with a plastic hammer?” But the boy just rolls his eyes, so I regroup and try again, saying, “Okay, okay, how about camping? You love camping. Would you take a fork and a spoon and a corkscrew out to the woods with you, or would you take a Swiss Army knife? You want some partial collection of random components that can only be held together with special rubber bands and neon blue baling wire you have to pay extra for? Or you want one complete assembly of high-grade tools that’re built to work in the harshest conditions and help you tackle whatever you need to do?” “Dad,” says my Knucklehead Son, “the Volks van will have a roof. And a heater. And lights.” “On your budget?” (Now I’m the one rolling my eyes.) “Anyhow, Son, let me beat this metaphor to death. Imagine your Swiss Army knife was built for professionals, survivalists, guys like What’s-his-name you watch on TV who’s always sleeping in swamps and eating bugs and drinking cactus juice. His job, his life, depends on the quality of that multi-tool he brings with him, and that’s exactly why we build Office 365, for those guys. The pros always know the difference between quality and

imitation, and they always know that “good enough” never is. Why do you suppose your school is making you use Google Apps?” “The teacher says it’s free.” “Which is not the same as Freemium.” “What?” “Never mind, I’ll bet some of your classmates like Google Apps just fine, right?” “Yeah, they think it’s really easy.” “Kind of like sign language.” “Yeah, maybe I should’ve stuck with Spanish.” And suddenly, just like that, my boy and I were in agreement. We’ll be visiting college campuses this spring, and we’re restoring an old rust-bucket VW van that’s perched on cinderblocks in the backyard right now. It’s costing us more time and money than any teenaged summer road trip could ever justify, and bringing me personally nothing but headaches, skinned knuckles, and these grime-encrusted fingernails that I have to hide at the office during meetings. Every weekend I trek to and from the local junkyards and return to our weedy backyard, replaying in my mind yet another YouTube video of some bearded genius in a backwards baseball cap changing out the ball joints in a sparkling clean VW pop-top in less time than it takes me just to spray on a good dose of Break-Free rust remover. But then, finally, after another wrestling match with the cold dumb metal, when my son finishes his Spanish homework and emerges from the house to check on “our progress,” I can raise my grease-stained hands high, grinning, touching from the bridge of my nose to the tip of my chin down to a pancake-crushing gesture and signing to him Boy! Go make me a sandwich!

To learn more about the productivity solution that IT Pros around the world depend on, please see our white paper “Why Enterprises Choose Office 365.” Selecting the right commercial-grade productivity solution is key to your success. In the end, it adds up to higher productivity, lower costs, and a more competitive business.

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