For decades, Microsoft has absolutely dominated when it comes to the workplace. Walk into any random business and chances are most, if not all of their machines, will be running Windows. Presentations will be made in Powerpoint, spreadsheets in Excel and, of course, reports, letterhead, and other documents will be done up in Microsoft Word. Slowly but steadily, however, the amount of business ditching Windows for more purpose-built or easier to use software has been growing over the past few years. Server backends may be spotted running Linux. Chromebooks may populate a real estate office. Macbooks may dominate a creative studio. The one thing all of those platforms have in common, however, is compatibility with Google Apps like Google Docs, Drive and Sheets. Google has announced that they are looking to leverage that fact by implementing new APIs that will allow deeper integration by developers with Google Apps than ever before.
Google’s announcement of the new APIs was bundled with their announcement of the new APIs’ first few users; Salesforce, SAP and Trello will be among the first to try their hand at deep integration with Google Apps, possibly backpedaling out of other ecosystems in the process. As Google’s app ecosystem is OS agnostic, of course, they may well keep their Windows PCs or Macbooks and occasionally use the competition’s tools for small or specialized tasks, though with the capabilities of Google Apps growing every day, that may soon be a thing of the past as well. This possibility is compounded by the fact that deep Google Apps integration means that work on one platform can follow users to another seamlessly and automatically.
The aim of all of this, of course, is to gain more users. Google’s ecosystem, at its most basic, operates through advertising and feeding into the core product, which is Search. For some Google Apps, such as Drive, paid options are available with more power or more features behind them. In either case, each new user is a little win for Google in the fight to break Microsoft’s workplace dominance. The new API will only reach Google Sheets and Google Slides for now, but Google has made it clear that they intend to have it in all of their productivity apps. As a bonus, Google Apps For Education is getting an update that will allow educators to send homework directly to a student’s queue. With development on Google’s app ecosystem going swimmingly, Microsoft may have to rethink their strategy in order to maintain their dominance.