Gartner: Cloud office not happening… yet
Much of the talk about business moving to the cloud is hype says Gartner.
However, the shift has begun and most will be working there in a decade.
Gartner says only 50 million big-company cloud office users work with services like Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 now. That sounds a lot, but it is just eight percent of the worldwide market.
The research company said the big shift will start in early 2015 and that by 2017 a third of those workers will be cloud-based. In 2022 that will reach 60 percent.
You’ve got to ask yourself how Gartner reached these numbers. It’s easy enough to measure what people are doing today – just look at software licence sales. Getting numbers for the next couple of years isn’t hard, ask people about their intentions.
But predicting numbers for almost a decade out? Surely that depends on software company plans as much as anything.
Recently Adobe decided to shift all its creative software to the cloud, if Microsoft makes a similar decision with Office, then everyone will head to the cloud whether they want to or not.
It’s going to take a long time, mainly because people don’t renew a Word or Excel license every year, so any change is unnecessary for non-mobile workers (which afaik still make up the majority) and is a cost increase instead of savings. It will be people moving from XP right now, but the people on 7 won’t need to do anything about their Office suite for another 5-10 years.
From what I’ve done/seen it is still a ‘looks good on paper’ deal, where inconsistencies, non-uniform UX and bad mobile broadband can make problems where there were no issues beforehand.