Google Maps Coordinate
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Anyone use it? I'm thinking it might be just the job for tracking our field service engineers.
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@Carnival-Boy looks neat but expensive.
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Much too expensive for me. BUt I have never checked into the costs of similar solutions.
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We've talked about building our own for many years. I don't think that it would take all that much to build one.
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$20 per user per month. That's not expensive is it?
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That's wildly expensive in my book. That's twice what we pay for a mobile line for those people. Just for an app to tell us their coordinates!
If you have one hundred employees that is $24K a year for something really basic.
It is the same cost as hosted Exchange, Lync, Yammer, Sharepoint and 10 installs of MS Office Pro Plus combined!
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I'm not sure if that price includes access to some awesome Google APIs. Out of the box, the system is pretty simple and has limited functionality. However, what it does do, it does beautifully. As you'd expect, the integration with Google Maps is fantastic. It has a cool job optimisation feature, where it will work out the most efficient way of completing your day's jobs, and will estimate how long it will take you to drive between jobs.
We have around ten field service engineers, eight sales reps and two lorry drivers. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year moving people around in metal boxes (if you include the cost of petrol, salaries, vehicles), whether that be visiting customers, servicing products or delivering boxes. It would only take a tiny improvement in efficiency for the product to pay for itself.
The biggest hurdle is dealing with staff resentment (the "big brother" objection). At the moment we don't track remote workers, and inevitably there will be abuse of this freedom by certain staff. The second biggest hurdle is the poor state of internet access in large parts of the UK. The system will work to a degree offline, but you do need a reasonable level of access to the internet throughout the day to make it work effectively.
As with any subscription service, the more users you have, the less attractive the subscription model can appear. If you have 100 users, I can see that $24k for a basic system might not appeal. But at that level, you'd be wanting to unlock some advanced features with the Google APIs. If you have just 20 users, as I do, $4.8k looks pretty good. I don't know how it compares with other products, or even what other products are out there. Any recommendations would be appreciated as always, but I can definitely see us benefiting from this system with very little additional work in setting it up.
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I'm sure that it is very nice and working out routes for you is pretty cool. The price just feels steep for "GoogleMaps" to report back to HQ.
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Considering all the value you get from O365 for $4-$8 a user, $20 seems outrageously overpriced.
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@Dashrender said:
Considering all the value you get from O365 for $4-$8 a user, $20 seems outrageously overpriced.
Yes. When compared to other SaaS products, this one just seems like you pay a premium for what looks like little more than a tack-on.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Yes. When compared to other SaaS products, this one just seems like you pay a premium for what looks like little more than a tack-on.
Any examples? I'm not arguing, I'm just interested. I don't think you can compare it with O365 as they're totally different products. Also O365 is massively underpriced for what you get because of the scale of use (Microsoft get massive economies of scale), the competitiveness of the market (mainly Google), and Microsoft strategy (they're targeting market share not profit). I assume the business model of both Microsoft and Google is to sell their core product dirt cheap to grab market share, and make money from additional services. Like Microsoft CRM ($65 per month) and Maps Coordinate. Disagree?
As an aside, once everyone is signed up to O365 or Google Apps, and the market has matured, what do you think will happen to prices? I think they can only go up in the long term. There are significant barriers to switching products (eg migrating from Google to Microsoft) which will have a negative effect on the competitiveness of the market (and hence prices). At the moment, both companies are competing with on-premise solutions. But we'll soon reach a point when on-premise solutions no longer exist (except in niche situations). What happens then? Cloud office solutions are often compared to traditional utility companies (gas, water, electric). I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but here in the UK these utility industries are massively uncompetitive (they blatantly collude on prices) - to the degree that the main opposition political party (Labour) will introduce price controls in gas and electric supply if elected next year. And that's with 6 main companies, we're likely to see just two companies "competing" in the IT utility market in the future (unless Apple and Amazon get more involved).
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@Carnival-Boy said:
we're likely to see just two companies "competing" in the IT utility market in the future (unless Apple and Amazon get more involved).
Although this is better than the end of the 20th century where Microsoft had a monopoly on e-mail, office apps and operating systems.
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Actually, Office 365's scale is smaller than that of Google's scale. Google's SaaS presence is still quite a bit larger than Microsoft's. I see that changing as Microsoft is doing a much better job, IMHO, but Google and Rackspace still own them on pure scale. So I think Office 365 is a great comparison. But if you don't feel it is, what about Google Apps itself? Same vendor but only 25% the cost of this service for something much larger.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
As an aside, once everyone is signed up to O365 or Google Apps, and the market has matured, what do you think will happen to prices? I think they can only go up in the long term.
Hosting prices will never go up. Not for the big enterprise players. The barriers to market entry just get lower and lower and the cost of delivering services is plummeting. There is no way to raise the price. Competitors would destroy them overnight and once trust was lost they would really be in tough shape. I think never before has the market had so much power to keep the prices down because of the subscription licensing model. With three key enterprise players in place all keeping prices super low to suppress competition and thousands of businesses wanting to get into the market themselves there is no way to raise the prices.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
But we'll soon reach a point when on-premise solutions no longer exist (except in niche situations). What happens then? Cloud office solutions are often compared to traditional utility companies (gas, water, electric). I don't know what the situation is like in the US, but here in the UK these utility industries are massively uncompetitive.
Hosted Apps are nothing like utilities. Utilities are, by their very nature, monopolies without competition. This is a physical necessity. Water, sewer, power, phones... only one provider can bring in the cables, pipes, etc. It's a guaranteed monopoly. Email is anything but. Anyone can compete with Microsoft if they want to. Heck, NTG has been a competitor in this market in the past. It's open and equal access. Not just locally but globally. The two are nearly polar opposites in this regards. Few things are less alike. What makes gas, water, etc. non-competitive doesn't exist with computing resources.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
we're likely to see just two companies "competing" in the IT utility market in the future (unless Apple and Amazon get more involved).
Although this is better than the end of the 20th century where Microsoft had a monopoly on e-mail, office apps and operating systems.
Microsoft never had a monopoly. People just perceive it that way because they felt that they had to have those things. But it was always by choice. Linux, Apple, IBM, Zimbra... options were always there and often as good or better. At the end of the 1990s Microsoft was only barely in the first place, actually. Awful systems like Lotus Notes were still huge.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I assume the business model of both Microsoft and Google is to sell their core product dirt cheap to grab market share, and make money from additional services. Like Microsoft CRM ($65 per month) and Maps Coordinate. Disagree?
And volume. Volume is huge. They make pennies per account but have massive numbers of accounts. And Microsoft, for example, hopes that it encourages people to buy Windows phones, desktop OS and other things too. They have a lot of products to sell.
But don't think of it as "this is their big strategy." Both companies do it because they have no choice. If they didn't do hosted email, someone else would and would do so without paying them. They HAVE to be big in this market or they stand to lose everything.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Hosted Apps are nothing like utilities. Utilities are, by their very nature, monopolies without competition. This is a physical necessity. Water, sewer, power, phones... only one provider can bring in the cables, pipes, etc. It's a guaranteed monopoly. Email is anything but. Anyone can compete with Microsoft if they want to. Heck, NTG has been a competitor in this market in the past. It's open and equal access. Not just locally but globally. The two are nearly polar opposites in this regards. Few things are less alike. What makes gas, water, etc. non-competitive doesn't exist with computing resources.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK anyone can become a gas and electric supplier, and there are a number of smaller competitors entering and leaving the market. Other companies own the physical infrastructure (National Grid), and utility companies effectively pay for their use - this is similar to Google and Microsoft operating on the internet, despite not owning the internet. The problem is, in order to get a decent price in the wholesale market, you need to place a huge order of gas. And in order to do that, you need a huge number of customers. It's lack of market share that acts as the barrier to entry, not physical resources. I see similarities here with hosted apps as Microsoft and Google grab more and more market share and smaller players find it harder and harder to compete on price.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Hosted Apps are nothing like utilities. Utilities are, by their very nature, monopolies without competition. This is a physical necessity. Water, sewer, power, phones... only one provider can bring in the cables, pipes, etc. It's a guaranteed monopoly. Email is anything but. Anyone can compete with Microsoft if they want to. Heck, NTG has been a competitor in this market in the past. It's open and equal access. Not just locally but globally. The two are nearly polar opposites in this regards. Few things are less alike. What makes gas, water, etc. non-competitive doesn't exist with computing resources.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK anyone can become a gas and electric supplier, and there are a number of smaller competitors entering and leaving the market. Other companies own the physical infrastructure (National Grid), and utility companies effectively pay for their use - this is similar to Google and Microsoft operating on the internet, despite not owning the internet. The problem is, in order to get a decent price in the wholesale market, you need to place a huge order of gas. And in order to do that, you need a huge number of customers. It's lack of market share that acts as the barrier to entry, not physical resources. I see similarities here with hosted apps as Microsoft and Google grab more and more market share and smaller players find it harder and harder to compete on price.
Yes, it's the same here - the exact opposite of capitalism, the farthest possible thing.... fake capitalism. It's the ultimate Orwellian dystopia. There is still a complete and utter monopoly. All you have done, the same as us, is trick consumers who see "choice of resellers" as the same as "choice." There is still one company providing the service, still one company making the money, just lots of people doing the billing on their behalf. It raises the overall costs both because no one can afford the volume that there used to be with the single vendor plus you have to pay for the existence of all of those other companies who provide no services at all. We've made utility delivery more expensive and convoluted so that we can placate a populous that doesn't know what capitalism is. It is smoke and mirrors.
Nothing similar to Microsoft and Google. They are different because:
- They are not a necessity, anyone can do without them.
- They share nothing. 100% unique services.
- You can go to different supplies, the market is flush with them.
- You can provide the service yourself without using them at all.
None of those things reasonably apply to power, gas, water, etc.
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Considering that Rackspace sells their services at just $1/user/mo and still makes a profit, I think that the volume and price numbers of Microsoft and Google show that there is nothing to worry about. Small players can enter the market very easily and offer differentiated services pretty easily.
