XLRI wins Google’s “App”titude Challenge..100+ colleges to implement Google Apps [Lateral Thinking]

March 13, 2009

By sinha

Google announced App-titude competition for colleges in August 2008 and the entire idea was to encourage students, faculty members and alumni from all engineering and management schools throughout India to move their institutions to Google Apps platform.

Google received close to 6,000 sign-ups and based on evaluation (product usage), XLRI was declared the winner.

As a result of the challenge, more than 100 colleges across India are now in the process of implementing Apps in their institutions. – blog

Power of Lateral Thinking

From sales/business development perspective, bureaucracy in educational institutions is one of the biggest challenge in closing the deal. Convincing IT team as well as college management is an uphill task and I am sure Google failed in it’s earlier attempt to penetrate into colleges.

B-schools/Engineering colleges love to compete with each other and Google just used this hook to get it’s App inside the system.

“App”titude challenge surely worked for them – simple math will tell you how much of money Google saved with this challenge – and most importantly, 100+ deals were closed in just a few months (I am sure a godo chunk of tier-2 colleges would have participated in this challenge as well).

Above all, getting access to ‘impressionable mind’ is what Google Apps Free Education Edition is trying to do – so that the next generation of users will not be hooked onto MS Office, but to Google Apps.

Smart strategy?

Tags: google apps, google apptitude challenge

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Mahesh on March 13, 2009 at 3:01 pm

Your Prediction is coming correctly

you said : “Do remember that Google is targeting colleges and schools by giving away it’s apps for free (which will now include Chrome) – in order to catch them young (and hook them forever). If it’s successful, the next generation will read Microsoft in history books only.“

Anand on March 13, 2009 at 5:26 pm

I guess this is a overstreached prediction. MS isn’t only about emails.

Both MS and Google have their strongholds in different areas. While MS is way behind Google in seach, Google is nowhere close to replacing the office suite.

- Ashish on March 13, 2009 at 7:45 pm
  
  Anand – Google Apps isnt about emails. Its about the entire office suite.
  And FYI – Google and zoho have replaced MS Office in several corporates: pluggd.in/category/online-office