August 24, 2008

Compatibility & Popularity: Why Google Is the New QuickBooks and Outlook.

Over the past 5 or more years there's been two applications that have been the clear leaders in the lives of smaller businesses. Intuit's QuickBooks and Microsoft Outlook. Although there's many competing products these two products have the largest market share and dominate in the ecosystem of support and add-on applications.

When you buy a product and it needs to connect to a financial or email program it always is compatible with QuickBooks and/or Outlook.

Increasingly, more applications are being built to be compatible with Google Apps. Of course being 'compatible' with Google apps is not that hard as Google makes its software quite "open" for all to connect to.

Earlier this month, for example, Success Factors (makers of HR management software) announced the integration of their software with Google apps.

"People shouldn't have to switch applications, or even browser tabs, to find information and collaborate with their colleagues," said Bill Rossi, director marketing enterprise for Google. "This Google Apps integration makes SuccessFactors customers more productive in one place and is a compelling example of the possibilities of cloud computing." You can find more information on the integration here.

Whether the application is software or hosted I'm finding Google Apps an increasingly part of the compatibility ecosystem.

Why?

Imagine Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, creating the first editions of Quicken. If he wanted to program a mapping module it would have eaten up a lot of development time. Today, he'd simply write a small piece of code to connect the address information to Google Earth and/or Google Map and overlay the information using Google.

tags: google , outlook , quickbooks | 0 comments