Monday, September 10, 2007

Google - the platform cometh

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd really like to see google or anyone for that matter, push out MS Exchange. Google does have a shot with their enterprise mail app. If they can get blackberry support in there its a win. It will also be interesting to see more and more companies that hook into the salesforce api. I think its a matter of crossing the bridge into the sas model for some large corps. Sas still is a scary thing for most.

Christopher Keene said...

I agree that MS Exchange is the mother lode - dynamite that thing and the whole she-bang is likely to crumble.

Good links between SalesForce and Google will go a long way towards making SaaS less scary. For example, I use Plaxo to sync across Outlook, Google, Yahoo and Linked In. Even if three of those services goes belly up, I still have my data!