It seems not long ago when Google Drive, SharePoint and Dropbox were competing with each other for becoming the best platform that would help businesses store data back in 2013. Now, after Google has recently announced new products that offer in a way similar services to Microsoft’s SharePoint, we are all wondering which one will in the end become the most used service from businesses and users.
Aimed to help businesses and users easily access information and work with it together, Google’s new enterprise tools are similar to SharePoint that empowers individuals, teams, and organizations to discover, share, and collaborate on content from everywhere they are and from any devices of their choice.
“A new Springboard app gives employees at companies subscribed to Google Apps for Work a unified search box for finding just about anything, including files in Google Drive, emails in Gmail and contacts. The company also unveiled the beta version of a revamped Google Sites, which is aimed at letting less sophisticated users inside a business build websites that can be used to share information internally,” according to an article by Blair Hanley Frank recently published on CIO.
If we take a superficial look, they both look very similar and in a way “force” users, businesses, and organizations “pick” among the two, but in reality this two services differ a lot and their aim contrasts quite a lot. Even though they both offer their clients productivity, communication, and collaboration tools, according to an article published on Real Story Group, here are the differences between Microsoft’s SharePoint and Google’s Springboard :
- “Microsoft tools overflow with features - in fact, so much so that we have a separate evaluations stream just for SharePoint. They tend to be complex andusers require training. Another important implication: you end up paying for features that you don't need / use at all.
- Google tools are developed first for the consumer (as opposed to enterprise) market. They emphasize essentials: feature-sparseness over feature-bloat, ease-of-use over tool complexity -- with one hitch, if you don't like something, you are limited in how much you can customize or extend it.
- Google pricing is simpler to parse while understanding Microsoft licensing practically requires a PhD (and several aspirins).
- Google is more of a cloud-purist. Like Henry Ford's Model T, you can have any cloud model you want, as long as it is public multi-tenancy. Microsoft offers private, public, and hybrid options -- along with a sizable on-premise offering.”
Google held its annual I/O developers conference I/O 2016 from May 18 to May 20. During the 3-day-event Google showcased previews of its latest products such as Google Assistant, Google Home, two messaging technologies Allo and Duo,etc. Compared to last year’s event Google I/O 2015 that was attended from over 6,000 developers from all over the world, this year the number of attendees was over 7000, and number of women attendees reached 23%, a lot more compared to the approximately 8% of women attendees during the last few years.
What Google will launch next is yet to be seen at Google I/O 2017.
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