Google Apps lures early adopters with low price, easy setup

January 08, 2008 (Network World) -- Max Hoberman helped make the Halo video game series a hit forMicrosoft's Xbox consoles, but when he founded his own business he decided to use the e-mail and calendar services offered by Microsoft's rival Google.

Hoberman's new game development company, Certain Affinity, in Austin, Texas, doesn't have any dedicated IT staff, so the practical benefits of using Google Apps were obvious -- it's free and easy to set up, Hoberman notes.

"I'm a UI designer by trade, so I care a lot about the interface," says Hoberman, who was the multiplayer and online lead designer for all three Halo video games. "I'm a huge fan of the interface for the Google applications. ... But to be completely honest, the thing that really decided it for me is it's free and we had it up and running quickly."

There are a couple of holdouts among Hoberman's 17 employees who still use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, but most of the staff has fully converted to Google Apps, he says.

Like Microsoft Office, Hoberman notes that Google does a good job providing a shared calendar program, and he thinks it does a better job with certain features like threaded e-mail conversations. "I used to try and set up Outlook to do threaded conversations," Hoberman says. "It's really hard to do it well in Outlook. Outlook does a silly thing -- it turns every e-mail into the start of the thread, and it just gets ugly and messy."

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