In the new issue of CIO magazine, Ben Worthen paints a picture of what he calls “the Google-future,” in which the Web computing model pioneered by “the company most everybody loves” comes to dominate business computing. Google, writes Worthen, is
poised to lead the Web computing revolution that everyone in the IT industry has been talking about since the 1990s. Google’s platform, along with the others bound to follow in its wake, will, over time, move computing to the Web and away from the desktop. As this happens, IT will get better – applications will be easier, faster and cheaper to use – much as it did when it moved off the mainframe 20 years ago. “We’re still far away from a holistic Web computing solution,” says Brian Shield, CIO of The Weather Channel. “But the pieces are not that far away. We’re not far from fostering greater productivity with Google’s name on it.”
Worthen’s right that we’re moving into a new era of business computing. Modular utility services will eventually displace most of the complex, proprietary systems that companies and their IT vendors have painstakingly – and often painfully – constructed over the last fifty years. And business computing, as it slowly frees itself from its client-server shackles, will indeed become “easier, faster and cheaper.” I’ve called it “the end of corporate computing,” meaning that most of the computing assets traditionally owned and maintained by individual corporations will come to be owned and maintained by outside utility suppliers.
But what will Google’s role be in the future of business IT? That’s much less clear. Worthen’s correct to point out that Google, “unencumbered by a legacy architecture,” has been able to build a utility computing infrastructure that’s far more advanced than what any big enterprise IT vendor can at this point offer. Where things become dicey is in figuring out how adaptable that infrastructure – and Google’s business model – will prove to be in supplying the computing needs of businesses.
Because Google presents a Kremlin-like enigma to outsiders, its inner workings and its plans are open to speculation. It’s easy to assume that there’s much more behind the Googleplex’s drawn curtains than has been revealed. To Worthen, it comes as
no surprise that people looking at the company just see a search engine, some snappy consumer applications and no coherent commercial strategy. “But what you see on the surface is just what they choose to show you,” says [Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp] Lenssen. “It’s like they are holding a magnet beneath a table. All you see is a metal ball moving around on top. Because you can’t see the magnet, you assume the ball is moving randomly.” Less colorfully put, because Google’s strength lies not in the applications it shows the world but in the architecture it doesn’t, the company’s business strategy is not readily apparent. But according to Lenssen, people who look at Google and see nothing more than random growth are making a big mistake. Most of the high-tech industry is just starting to realize this.
Maybe so. But what is that business strategy, as it applies to the enterprise market? Worthen’s article is at its most intriguing when he’s quoting Dave Girouard, who is the general manager of Google’s enterprise division. Let me take the liberty of piecing together a few of Worthen’s tea-leafy comments:
“Our infrastructure is an important competitive advantage for us. It has incredible reliability and scalability, and the cost per user is incredibly low … The wall between consumer and worker is dropping. People can work from anywhere. There’s a real blurring of the line. People are people. They don’t turn into information scientists when they show up at work in the morning. There are a lot of opportunities for us there. We let things take root and mature on the consumer side. And where it makes sense, we’ll bring something over to the enterprise … Over the next five to 10 years, [the enterprise division] will become a big part of Google … It will happen without people noticing. People look for a eureka moment but things just seep in. That’s what’s happening here.”
This is a radical vision for the evolution of corporate IT. Rather than enter the enterprise through the CIO and his staff, Google is looking, Girouard implies, to bypass the IT Department altogether. It will simply go on providing an ever larger set of simple, flexible services, and it will leave it to individual workers and the business units they’re part of to, in effect, cobble those services together into an entirely new corporate IT architecture. What I think Girouard is saying – and it’s consistent with the messages that come from his superiors – is that Google sees no point in competing head-on with IBM and SAP and Oracle and EDS for corporate accounts. It will let those vendors oversee the orderly decline of the old model of IT – the model that, it’s worth remembering, still accounts for all their profits – while the new model, the Google model, grows organically inside organizations. It’s happy, in other words, to let a disruptive technology – in this case, Web computing – take its natural course, growing from the bottom up to eat away at, and ultimately replace, the old model. (It also explains why Google is obsessed with Microsoft; Microsoft is the only major IT vendor that also has a strong business serving consumers.)
Of course, Google faces plenty of challenges. Most obviously, it has a long way to go in creating the kind of software services companies will require to run their businesses. And it’s ad-supported business model doesn’t seem transferable to the enterprise market, beyond very small companies. But Google’s biggest hindrance may end up being its ideology. It seems to believe, above all, in empowering individuals. That’s a fine ideal. But while businesses want to empower their employees, they also need to control them. Empowerment without control doesn’t work in the context of a good-sized organization bent on maximizing its profitability. If Google stakes its future purely on bottom-up empowerment, without also acknowledging managers’ need to exert top-down control, it may be limiting its prospects in the enterprise market.
In this regard, Rearden Commerce presents a useful contrast to Google. Rearden is also trying to provide web services at the intersection between individuals’ personal and corporate lives. By “mashing up” data from many different sources, such as airline reservation systems, it helps workers manage their personal business expenses and activities. At the same time, it offers companies sophisticated options for imposing control over those expenses and activities. It seeks to empower users, and thus achieve bottom-up adoption, but it also provides companies with the kind of top-down controls that can help rationalize and reduce overall expenses. There’s something to be said for providing services that actually solve corporate problems as well as empowering individuals.
It remains to be seen whether Google will be able to adapt its noble and strongly-held “user empowerment” ideology to the realities of big-company operations. The company’s confidence and arrogance are strengths, but they’re also weaknesses.
But Worthen ends on the right note. Even if “Google implodes on its own, done in by growth, internal squabbling or hubris,” he writes, “the model will survive and thrive. Applications are destined to move to the Web. Perhaps not all at once, and maybe not even quickly (after all, companies are still running Cobol applications on mainframes), but Google has demonstrated that the Web computing model is viable … And that’s going to change everything for CIOs.”
Yeah, Google architecture has a lot of value and they aren’t the only ones doing this kind of thing:
Big Systems from Simple, Unreliable Components
Unfortunately, most of enterprise-land is still locked into 3-tier architecture and app servers, missing the coming wave.
Google’s strategy is already working. I use GMail and GCal over the Salesforce.com endorsed Outlook/Exchange infrastructure. Sure, businesses want control, but not all of the control businesses want actually add value. Most enterprises can relinquish a great deal of control and control infrastructures and come out ahead. Work-life overlap is only going to accelerate the individual centric trend. A classic case for this is email – why would a company want to do any more than maintain a few redirects and directory of employee webmail addresses? What is the business case for doing anything more?
BTW, it’s Reard*e*n.
Good post, but I think you’re a bit off in your conclusion about Google vis-a-vis Microsoft. Google is interested in Mirosoft not because they speak to consumers… but because they infiltrated the enterprise via individual workers. I’d say that Microsoft Office is the largest enterprise application in use today… and it got that way without ever going through IT. Office revenues exceed all of SAP and the old PeopleSoft combined, I believe.
That’s what Google’s trying to figure out. What are the individual productivity tools that individuals need at work, and how are they uniquely able to provide the users those tools. Without IT intervening too much. Just like Microsoft did wayback…
So will Google be any more successful than Microsoft in providing the “next ERP system?” I doubt it. And they won’t care. This is not about “moving old applications to Web 2.0” (which is why all the hoopla about “Office 2.0” is pretty silly)… this is about finding new usage patterns that are currently being served by those old apps – and which can be better served by the new architecture!
Dan Bricklin didn’t revolutionize computing because he ported a spreadsheet from the mainframe to the PC… it was because he invented the paradigm, providing a new, easier way to do something workers needed, and that leveraged the benefits of the new architecture (which meant IT couldn’t suggest alternatives). VisiCalc stole a lot of business away from the IT folks…. just like the next-gen internet-applications from Google and others will steal from enterprise IT and from Microsoft….
To do that, you need to understand the individual worker… and nobody understands that better than Microsoft.
Kingsley and Phil, Good comments. Thanks. Kingsley, I agree that companies can easily go too far to the control side (and many have in the IT area, often because of technical constraints). There’s a balance that needs to be struck, but empowerment without control can too easily become chaos, and chaos is expensive. (I fixed the misspelling, by the way.) Phil, I think what you say in your first couple of paragraphs is what I was trying to get across about Google and Microsoft (I probably shouldn’t have used the word “consumers”). And I would have made the other points you make as well, if I were smarter. Nick
Really interesting post.
It is the infrastructure part that worried me when it comes to Google. It is a completely closed shop. No one knows what it is – except they claim it is “different” to everyone else.
So what do they know that we don’t know? What have they sacrificed to obtain this model?
When will we see the first rolling outages of service, the lost user data, hacking, inexplicable events. Surely they are on the horizon.
One of the big advantages touted by open-source advocates is the eyballs on the code to identify issues and problems. We have the exact reverse with Google. I can tell you what most enterprises are doing instrastructure-wise – with Google we have little or no idea.
A problem? yes, if you are trusting your web/digital life to them!
Simon
Interop: Google Sells to the Enterprise
“The general manager of Google Enterprise, Dave Girouard, concluded his Interop keynote with a sales pitch: Google OneBox for the enterprise.”
http://www.podtech.net/?p=582
Interop: Consumer Technology Driving Innovation Says Google Exec
http://www.podtech.net/?p=581
It’s a Toys-R-Us brand.
Google’s great for making beer money with banner ads–that’s about it. This is a company that makes money with a fancy hitbot and link rotation script. LOL.
This is a great post! Unfortunately, being a non-techie this is strange, but I have to go back to the architecture. Where is google going to fall off in an enterprise/business to business discussion – scalability/reliability. Whatever is “behind their curtain” is a whole lot of servers running in n+1 mode the likes of a distributed architecture (think millions of desktops) will outperform to infinitim. MSFT with their marketshare in the desktop space can act similar to any chat engine does today…infinitely scalable architecture based on distribution of processing. Extending that further – why would I put an application in a core, or even on a network for distribution, when I can distribute them across desktops and “enact” them based on user need. (think blockbuster vs netflix vs Comcast on demand – ok, kind of the same) Where is the enterprise call center when inbound customer calls can be routed just as easy to the CFO as they can to the call center agent logged into a PC in India? What happens when the phone is the PC and the PC is the network (PBX, ACD, all of those IT infrastructure acronyms)? Do I need a CRM solution when everytime someone IMs me, I can capture the intimate details of the person, the IM history, what they bought from me in the past, etc…all at my desktop app? When 80% of the population is either behind a PC or behind a smart mobile phone during their waking hours it changes a lot of paradigms. I see the death of the smart network! CSCO – your just plumbing -again! MSFT has been too quiet lately across many fronts – CRM, IT applications, etc… they are building their story, filling in the gaps, and then look out. disclaimer – I left a major enterprise telecom technology company because of the future I saw and own no stock or love for MSFT. :-)
There’s tremendous value in personal systems (beyond the browser), e.g. laptops, handhelds, and flash drives. The technology for server-centric productivity apps has been around since the late 80’s (remember X Terminals?), but the market doesn’t want it. Individuals love truly personal computing, versus belonging to a collective which observes their every keystroke.
There’s no question that Windows is unmanageable, unreliable, and malware-prone. But web-centric solutions propose to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The real solution is what I call the “always-on-you web”. See my blog for more.
What people fail to realize in this analysis is that Google is an archtype for true web-based applications that render desktop computing initiatives irrelevant. Google’s strategy is given far too much scrutiny and the paradigm itself too little. Too much focus on Google distracts us from the perturbation in business thinking that Google’s success will cause. It may not be Google who reinvents the IT workplace, but a combination of Google-like companies.
Google combines extreme competence, utility, innovation, strong branding, consumer confidence, and desktop OS irrelevance into their business strategy. This is a new type of company, and the challenge for similar companies is to get consumers to recognise that they are “Google-like”.
Bloated IT infrastructure is indeed a good target for such companies. But, Google will not be alone 10 years from now. People need to start recognizing the characteristics of the pattern in action. Not focusing on one particular pattern-maker.
Google’s strategy is not working — at least with us. While some of our younger workers have been eager to use 3rd party online apps to do their work, we’ve had to remind them that company/client data can only be hosted with vendors with whom we have a contractual arrangement.
Google and others will *have* to deal with the messy corporate bureacracy they hope to avoid because it’s still relatively easy to block access to web sites at the firewall…