The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

Nicholas Carr covered the recent Google/Capgemini partnership announcement here. We are seeing an "Innovator's Dilemma" market appear before our eyes - cheap but underpowered Google apps against expensive, full-featured Microsoft apps. While the feature bigots laugh, Google apps will creep into the corporate IT fabric around the edges.

It will be interesting to see how the SIs start to knit Google apps into the corporate IT environment. There will be an opportunity to create the equivalent of SalesForce.com's App Exchange around Google's apps/gadgets/storage. By driving an on-demand platform into Microsoft's turf, Google accomplishes two goals:

1. Keep Microsoft off balance so they can't put all their efforts into taking on Google in Search
2. Open up a "protected" market where Microsoft can't follow without undermining its own desktop business

Google recently announced pub/sub gadgets, which makes their potential role as an enterprise platform provider even more interesting.

Labels: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Google, Google Gadgets

I sit on the board of Kapow, a company that allows you to turn anything on the web into a data source.

As a thought experiment, I asked their executive team to tell me the most valuable database on the planet?

Here are some potential winners:

• D&B - all the financial data you could hope for - nope
• IMS - all the medical data you could uncover - nope

And the answer is...Google (is it my imagination or is the answer to almost every question these days Google?) The point is that the really valuable information is increasingly moving to the web. That means that the next generation of data adapters will treat the web as a gigantic database (albeit one that requires clever robots from Kapow to take full advantage of).

For example, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (say that 3 time fast) wanted to put together the definitive global warming portal, they found that the best information was all on the web, and turned to Kapow to get that information into a single portal.

Labels: Google, kapow