Zimbra - the on-line vs off-line user experience

Zimbra is extending its on-line email collaboration suite to enable offline use...something Microsoft's Outlook has been able to do for 10 - 15 years. Here is the conundrum; Will the user experience be better for Microsoft Office trying to go on-line, or for off-line apps like Zimbra, Zoho, Google Apps trying to support off-line use? Not only are they starting from completely different bases, but the user expectations for features, performance, and support, are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Microsoft Office has 450 million users and generates $12B in revenues, which is about $27 per user per year. Zimbra claims to have 6 million users, not all paid, but they charge about $30 per user per year.

The advantage to being a start-up or beta product is that expectations are low, and any feature enhancement is heralded as a killer innovation. Start-ups attract "early adopter" users who are willing to try new things, put up with missing features, bugs, and poor customer support. They are willing to grow along with the product. This is why it is easier for start-ups or low end products to move "up market" than it is for established high end products to move "down market".

Email, web browsers, and office suites are the killer apps for most information workers.

• Email can be accessed on-line, processed off-line, or even on your smart phone or Blackberry. Microsoft Outlook allows users to have all email on the local disk and work offline. You can read, delete, respond, and create new emails in off-line mode, and everything synchs up when you go back on-line. The on-line and off-line problem has been solved for email. Zimbra, and other on-line start-ups are just catching up.
• Browsers only work effectively on-line. You can of course "cache" web pages locally or use the browser off-line to render local content. Technologies like AJAX and Apollo are putting more functionality in the browser, and small local databases are being used to store more application logic and data for off-line use. Given a large enough disk it is possible to store most of the web sites you care about and keep them up to date (synched) with the latest content. So, the off-line problem is technically solved for web browsers, but not practical for browser based applications.
• Office suites (spreadsheet, word processor, presentations) have been strictly off-line client applications. Zimbra, Zoho, Google Docs, and others have recently released "on-line" versions of these office suite tools. These applications are primitive compared to Microsoft Office in terms of features, and only work on-line. The on-line start-ups, the Firefox browser team, and the Apollo team, are working hard to bring off-line functionality to browsers.

It is all about the user experience and expectations. It is really not a question of if on-line apps can work off-line, or vice versa. Lets assume really smart engineers can figure out how to make it work. The question is "Is the user delighted with the experience in both modes?" 

Microsoft has been talking about the seamless Client/Server/Services continuum for years now. The idea is that users want the same functionality and seamless user experience on-line or off-line, on a laptop, in a browser, or on their cell phone. They want  all their actions in synch across all usage modes and devices so that the email you read on your cell phone shows up as read on your laptop, or the change you made to your spreadsheet shows up in all versions.

Finding the right balance is the key. The data and "state" must be the same across all devices and usage modes, but the presentation and navigation on your cell phone will be different than what you see on your 17 inch desktop screen. Desktop applications have tons of features, integration with other applications, and leverage the desktop operating system. All of this can't be replicated in a browser. The trick will be finding the right balance of features and functions that make the user experience seamless and obvious.

The expectations of these users and the sheer scale of serving hundreds of millions of users on-line makes this a very significant challenge for Microsoft. Microsoft is building two giant $500M data centers to support the on-line business. Office Live is a whole new on-line platform for hosted applications. The infrastructure and platform is in place, now the challenge is designing applications with seamless user experiences. That will be the toughest job of all.

Subscribe - To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email go here and enter your email address in the box in the right column.

 

Comments

[John Dowdell]

"Technologies like AJAX and Apollo are putting more functionality in the browser...."

I'm not sure I see that... Apollo adds a little bit to the in-browser experience (the ability to download a desktop app, mainly), but its authoring and runtime abilities still use regular HTML/JS/CSS and SWF technologies. Apollo brings in-browser work beyond-the-browser, rather than changing in-browser work itself.

jd/adobe

[Michael R. Farnum]

"Zimbra is extending its on-line email collaboration suite to enable offline use...something Microsoft's Outlook has been able to do for 10 - 15 years."

Ahhhh, but Outlook has only been doing this WELL for the last 3 or 4 years.

[Brian Despain]

Don you seem to forget not everyone is running everything from Microsoft. Zimbra is a great solution and they are getting traction in the marketplace. Where are you getting your user figures? Are those just the people that bought a copy of Office but may not run Outlook?

[TechNomads]

Great site. Was searching for some blogs similar to mine and I just added your rss feed to my reader! Look forward to the next post!