Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Microsoft expands in the cloud. 

The Google brand was built off of free lunches. Nevertheless, contrary to conventional blogosphere wisdom, Google is NOT “eating Microsoft’s lunch” in the enterprise cloud.

Google Apps is, literally, a joke in the enterprise, as I reported first hand from the Enterprise Search Summit one year ago and reiterate with each and every not so shock and awe Googley move that responds to serious, proprietary, secure enterprise computing needs with sophmoric, entry-level, shared software devoid of serious functionality and mocking of enterprise-class security and privacy.

Google Sites is but the latest laughable attempt at a Googley consumerization of the enterprise. While geeks gone wild was the tech early adopter blogosphere embrace of a cutesy, template-driven free, Google online Web site service, I underscored how any enterprise foolish enough to use Google Sites, would end up getting what it paid for: NOTHING!

SEE: Why Google Sites Is BAD Business: ‘Til Death Do Us Part’?

Microsoft announces today:

the company will offer Microsoft Online Services to businesses of all sizes. This announcement marks a significant step for Microsoft toward expanding its software plus services strategy.

Geeks are NOT going wild, however, egging Microsoft on for a (food) fight mano a mano with Google solely in the cloud. Will a day ever come that software WILL solely be delivered in the cloud? Unlikley. Microsoft is laying a foundation for a rational, online-offline, complementary enterprise exploitation of software assets. 

The stand alone, free Google cloud is NOT enterprise friendly. The stark reality of Google Terms Of Service:

You agree that Google has no responsibility or liability for the deletion or failure to store any Content and other communications maintained or transmitted by Google services. You acknowledge that Google may have set no fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions you may send or receive through Google services or the amount of storage space used; however, we retain the right, at our sole discretion, to create limits at any time with or without notice.

Google reserves the right at any time and from time to time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, Google services (or any part thereof) with or without notice. You agree that Google shall not be liable to you or to any third party for any modification, suspension or discontinuance of Google services.

The Microsoft BETA Terms Of Service acknowledge the offline reality of serious business: 

You are responsible for maintaining and backing up your data that you create, use and store with the service. You are responsible for ensuring that you maintain your primary means of business.

If a business relies on the free Google cloud to maintain its primary means of business, it risks being out of business!

MORE ON THE VERY RISKY GOOGLE “ENTERPRISE”:

There Is NO Google Apps Love in the Enterprise and
Postini: Will Google REALLY Mean Enterprise Apps Business? and
Google Chokes with Postini: Billion Dollar Office Apps Giveaway and
TINY Google Web Services Lag BIG Microsoft Business and
Google Confirms: Enterprise Apps is NO Microsoft Office Killer and
Schmidt to Ballmer: Stop Stealing MY Office Collaboration Lines! and
Microsoft Office Thunder to Blast Google Apps Cloud and
IBM Confirms: Google Poses NO Enterprise Threat

PLUS: PAY PER BLOG? WHAT KILLER BUSINESS MODEL 

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Will the enterprise IT world arrive today on the job bracing for an employee revolution, facing inexorable worker demands for corporate happiness via Google Apps Team Edition?

So goes the Google Enterprise spiel, obligingly presented by pre-briefed media, both old and new:

Ben Worthen, The Wall Street Journal, wears his NOT-SO hard news objectivity on his headline sleeve: “Google marginalizes tech departments even more” How can the WSJ be so sure? Google PR told Worthen so:

Google is bottoms up, appealing directly to individuals, encouraging them to bring the tools they use in their personal lives into the workplace. To that end, Google built a feature into Team Edition that lets IT departments upgrade to the full corporate version of Google Apps if it realizes that a large number of its workers are using it.

Elinor Mills, CNET, leads with the Google PR talking point: ”Just like rogue employees in the 1990s forced instant messaging into corporations, the new Google Apps Team Edition being launched on Thursday offers a way for workers to slip a hosted apps service into the enterprise,” reinforcing the Google Enterprise marketing pitch: 

“People are already using the consumer (hosted Google) apps in the workplace, like they did IM a decade ago,” said Jeremy Milo, senior marketing manager for Google Apps. “We’re trying to bring more security by introducing the notion of domain awareness.”

BUT, who is really forcing what where? Google may have dreams of a Les Miserables like “bottoms-up” employee cry of “We want our Google Apps,” but the enterprise IT world is having the last laugh, at Google Enterprise’s ongoing expense.

READ ALL ABOUT HOW There Is NO Google Apps Love in the Enterprise:

Postini: Will Google REALLY Mean Enterprise Apps Business? and
Google Chokes with Postini: Billion Dollar Office Apps Giveaway and
TINY Google Web Services Lag BIG Microsoft Business and
Google Confirms: Enterprise Apps is NO Microsoft Office Killer and
Schmidt to Ballmer: Stop Stealing MY Office Collaboration Lines! and
Microsoft Office Thunder to Blast Google Apps Cloud and
IBM Confirms: Google Poses NO Enterprise Threat

PLUS: LinkedIn To Mine User Data For Corporate Espionage and Poynt IM Local Search: Will Yellow Pages on BlackBerry Crack the Code? and Why Silicon Alley VCs Should Do Blogging Due Diligence, Too and Cuill? Google Vet Startups Pose NO Threat: FriendFeed, Howcast, Zillow

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Google Enterprise touts its Google Apps product IS meant for business, hailing three Postini product enhancements: Message filtering, security and discovery.

Managing email systems has never been easy, and for many businesses it only seems to be getting harder: Not only do you have to worry about increasingly complex email security threats, upgrades and patches, but archiving and e-discovery needs to meet regulatory requirements are also on the rise. We believe cloud computing can dramatically simplify this problem for our customers and reduce costs, and today we’re taking another step to make it so.

BUT, will Google take a really big step to make its really big enterprise ambitions ”so”?

In There Is NO Google Apps Love in the Enterprise and TINY Google Web Services Lag BIG Microsoft Business and Google Chokes with Postini: Billion Dollar Office Apps Giveaway I analyze how Google is making NO serious Google Apps PAID headway.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt conveniently forgot his suppposed new motto last week in his 2007 Q4 report to Wall Street, “Search, Ads and Apps”: Wall Street is apparently forgetting it too! GOOG continues to be stubbornly 99% AdWords and AdSense pure (SEE Google Execs Silent On NYC Print, Radio, TV Promises) and the Googler in Chief underscored the GOOG magic is NOT highly diversified:

Where we see big opportunities and our primary focus on investments is in fact in our core business, and you see the success we had in 2007 and in Q4, the vast majority of that was actually not in all the things that generates all the exciting new announcements that we are happy to talk about, but in investments in core search and core advertising globally, which I’m incredibly proud of.

Schmidt was NOT particularly proud to dwell on Google Apps’ track record. When asked by an analyst, “Should we assume that most of the growth in licensing was due to the Postini acquisition in the quarter?” Schmidt cut off his products point man:

JONATHAN ROSENBERG: I think we’ve had a lot of success to date with small businesses. We added a lot of ISPs, which tend to drive a lot of the traffic. We also pushed a lot of the education efforts, which I think had a pretty significant component. Beyond that, it’s hard to –

SCHNMIDT: The answer to your question is yes. It’s easier that way. Why don’t we go to our next question?

The BIG question for Google Enterprise is can it REALLY mean Apps Business: WILL GOOGLE EVER STEP UP TO THE DIRECT ENTERPRISE SALES PLATE IN A MEANINGFUL WAY? Google extols the self-serve and reseller sales models because they cost the least for Google. You get what you DON’T pay for though.

Google’s steady stream of incremental product upgrades do not sell themselves to businesses. Google bought Postini with the aim of being a serious enterprise player. The Google Apps pitch is not an easy sell, but if the Postini add-on is as powerful as Google hails, Mountain View ought to invest more heavily in direct sales along with product development.

MORE:  Google Apps Meets Les Miserables: Enterprise IT Team DREAMS Big

ALSO: Is Union Square Ventures Changing Exit Strategies? and Microsoft’s Yahoo Bid a Winner: Google Running Scared! and LinkedIn To Mine User Data For Corporate Espionage

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Google has a big Enterprise problem, and it just got $1.2 billion worth bigger: Arch software rival and enterprise powerhouse Microsoft is buying Fast Search and Transfer so their combined market power will “help businesses capitalize on the power of entreprise search”: Fast’s solutions are “operational at over 3500 mission critical installations.”

I asked Kevin Gough, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Google Enterprise, at the Enterprise Search Summit in May, “Why can’t Google make any serious money in Enterprise Search?”

I also asked Jared Spataro, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), how Microsoft fights Google in the enterprise trenches.

“Enterprise search is our business, it’s our house and Google is not going to take that business,” Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, has assured business partners. Spataro told me it is his job to “deliver on that commitment and ensure that we marshall all of our resources and assets to compete effectively in this market.”

Microsoft takes a “very straightforward, two-step approach,” in walking IT buyers thorough a comparative value proposition analysis, Spataro indicated:

We start with a baseline overview of core Enterprise Search capabilities.  Google’s Search Appliances are fundamentally based on the theory that if you take web search and slowly modify it over time you’re going to get it right for the Enterprise. We disagree.  We think that if you start with web search and slowly modify it over time, you end up with web search that never quite crosses the threshold of what IT Professionals need to do the job right.

Google’s Mini business targets the low-end, transactional buyer, Spataro told me, “But increasingly IT purchases of Search are being driven by “silo buyers” or “strategic buyers,” both of whom sit in IT and both of whom have high expectations for a potential solution”:

The most interesting trend we’re seeing is the increasing involvement of the “strategic buyer” in the search decision process. This buyer—who tends to be a senior IT exec with responsibility for a broad set of IT investments—understands the value of an integrated business productivity platform. This gives us a base to work from in making the Search discussion not just a conversation about the here-and-now problem of Search, but a more productive dialogue about the value of Search as a part of a broader productivity investment.

Spataro on core Microsoft vs. Google differentiators:

Security – We offer the ability to index access control lists and the ability to do real-time security trimming.  Google does only real-time security trimming.

Scalability and High Availability – We offer an architecture that allows IT Professionals to create a search topology/deployment that meets their needs—for scalability, high availability or both.  Google is locked to the Appliance model and is limited in both dimensions.  Our single-index alone scales to more than 20 million more docs than Google; The ability to cluster web front ends and query servers and support for dedicated indexing hardware makes all the difference.

Customization/Development – Our search solutions are built on a technology stack that no one in the industry can match, allowing customers to easily customize the look and feel with dedicated design tools or to access our web service interfaces or object models to fully customize the solution.

Relevance – Our relevance algorithms were designed for the Enterprise and have been tuned for the environment. Google’s relevance algorithms started with Page Rank, an approach that works well on the Internet but that doesn’t yield good results inside the firewall.

Unstructured Content Search – We support more content sources out of the box (including Lotus Notes) and have an open architecture for writing connectors to other unstructured content sources.

Structured Content Search – The Business Data Catalog allows customers to connect to structured data systems and line-of-business systems with no-code, providing the ability to both index the information and perform “business actions” on the results; Customers can build composite apps that use search as an interface for really driving business processes. In contrast, Google’s OneBox is a clever—but limited—federation framework that hard-codes how you interface with specific systems.

Manageability – Our approach to meta-data management is far superior, allowing customers to easily manage information the system finds as it crawls content; Google has no ability to manage metadata.

Desktop Search – Windows Desktop Search, for Windows XP, and Windows Vista provide rich, actionable search interfaces.  We do extremely well when customers compare our offerings to Google Desktop; Google Desktop is browser-based and has the limitations—both in presentation as well as interaction—of typical browser-based applications.

Google has MANY enterprise limitations, as I discuss in There Is NO Google Apps Love in the Enterprise.

Not only is the much ballyhooed Googley consumerization of the enterprise NOT happening, corporate decision makers are wondering if Google Enterprise is a joke! What’s more, even Google partner IBM has written off Google’s attempts to be a serious enterprise contender. SEE:  IBM Confirms: Google Poses NO Enterprise Threat 

MORE on how Google is NOT “feeling lucky” in the enterprise: Google Confirms: Enterprise Apps is NO Microsoft Office Killer and Google Chokes with Postini: Billion Dollar Office Apps Giveaway and TINY Google Web Services Lag BIG Microsoft Business and Interop: Citrix XenSource Flys as Google Crashes.

ALSO: Autonomy vs. Google Search Appliance? No Contest: Google Enterprise Gets Defensive and Data Portability ‘Magic’? Australian Faraday Media Pushes Web Agenda in U.S.

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Who needs Aristotle, Socrates, Plato…when Google offers “Our Philosophy.”  Heck, who needs Moses’ Ten Commandments, as Jeff Jarvis continues his ludicrous public cry to join him in worshipping God Google, really.

Google concurs: “To fully understand Google, it’s helpful to understand all the ways in which the company has helped to redefine how individuals, businesses and technologists view the Internet.” 

On the eve of the New Year, when learned men and women generally reflect on how, as individuals, we can help make the world a better place, Jeff Buzz Machine Jarvis doubles down on his inane campaign to negate thousands of years of spiritual yearning with an ode to a ruthless, $200 billion market cap corporation with the unholy mission of obtaining and controlling all the “information” in the world as its own private, for-profit property, aka Google.

What is REALLY scary, is that Jarvis is undoubtedly evangelizing his personal, one-corporation G worship to the nation’s future journalists as an instructor at the City University of New York, and MY tax dollars are helping fund the irrational, and dangerous, Google exuberance!

How IS Google God? Google has encapsulated all its Googley “ways” in a “Ten Things Google has found to be true” handy cheat sheet.

I repost them below (in italics), along with my Insider Chatter translation (in bold) of how Google is REALLY redefining how individuals, businesses and technologists are impacted by the Internet, Google’s Internet.

1) “Focus on the user and all else will follow”

There is NO escape: We follow the user all over the World Wide Web, and into the cloud.

2) “It’s best to do one thing really, really well”

It’s better to do dozens of things ad hoc, keeping our Googley fingers crossed that some will work out OK.

3) “Fast is better than slow”

We control YOUR data: Caching content owned by everyone else within Google’s server farms keeps US in control.

4) “Democracy on the Web works.”

Here’s the (Back)Rub: Google Democracy is for sale to the highest, non-transparent bidder.

5) “You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer”

We know where you live, work, play…what you think, dream…

6) “You can make money without doing evil”

A little evil is good for the bottom line, a lot of evil makes us GOD.

7) “There’s always more information out there.”

Resistance is futile, we WILL control the world’s information, all of it.

8) “The need for information crosses all borders.”

Who needs the United Nations! YouTube is the only electorate that matters.

9) “You can be serious without a suit”

It won’t be any fun to watch GOOG on the way down, but there is always the free lunch.

10) “Great just isn’t good enough”

Thanks to our Fuzzy Logic, Google is always great! Just Google-It, or ask Jeff Jarvis!

Jarvis’s new found G religion apparently worships dominant corporate market share which crushes all competition, oversized corprorate profit margins garnered at the expense of millions of businesses worldwide and defacto corporate control of the World Wide Web.

Fortunately for the sane Internet world, however, Jarvis’ spiritually misguided G yearnings may soon haunt him. While Jarvis revels in rattling off Google’s mighty corporate dominance stats, keen Wall Street analysts have a keen eye on the one-trick, rich pony that is GOOG.

YouTube may hope to move the elections, but it is NOT moving GOOG. Tech bloggers may swoon over Google Apps, but corporations are shunning it. Google Checkout may succeed in garnering free PR media puff pieces, but Google can’t buy its way to success…

Google Gears, Open Social, Android…so little, so late.

BUT, the biggest, baddest Google problem of all is the GOOG cash machine itself, Google.com. Read all about it in: Google Knol: The End of Google.com, NOT Wikipedia 

ALSO: 2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook and
Browser Flack: Will Google Ever Escape Microsoft Rule? and
There Is NO Google Apps Love in the Enterprise and
Lost On Google Maps! What Merry Christmas? and
Google Warning: How GOOG 411 Tricks Consumers and
Google Zeitgeist: $200 University Payola AdWords Scam and
Google Ignores Hanukkah, Again: Festival of Lights Dark on Homepage and
Google AdWords Plus Box: Local CPC Bidding War Unleashed! 

ALSO: Rich Skrenta: Blekko ‘Absurd’ Search Startup Disses King Google

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Good riddance Netscape? Blogosphere reaction to AOL’s announcement of the end of the line for its Netscape Browser ranges from fond nostalgia to intense disdain. Lost in the Internet Explorer vs. Firefox vs. Netscape debate, however, is the still browserless Google!

GBrowser anyone? Not according to Googler in Chief Eric Schmidt and friends. BUT WHY NOT?

It is the Google mission to “organize the world’s information,” all of it, in Google’s cloud, a very BIG cloud. The Schmidt holiday wish: 90 percent of all computing shall reside in the cloud, a Google branded one. After all, if Google succeeds in shifting the world’s computing from the PC to the cloud, it will be a “real improvement for people’s lives” because (Microsoft powered) computers are complex and unreliable, so preaches Schmidt.

The very same computers that Google disses, however, power Google’s cloud computing!

Upon Google’s announcement of its purported Microsoft killing Gear’s in May, I was the lone voice underscoring Google’s love hate relationship with the (Microsoft) desktop. I asked, does it gall CEO Schmidt to have to “Microsoft-enable” Google products? OR, does he get personal satisfaction in “using” Microsoft to achieve his Microsoft domination end-game?

“Because the Web is Google’s platform, we are interested in improving it as much as we can,” so declared Bret Taylor, Google Gears evangelist, of the planned “browser extension for creating offline Web applications.” For a user to access ”Google’s platform,” however, he or she generally arrives via Microsoft, desktop and browser.

Schmidt on Gears:

With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud.

The Google platform is dependent upon its biggest competitor’s ”browser,” aka Microsoft Internet Explorer, big time.

MORE: There Is NO Google Apps Love in the Enterprise and TINY Google Web Services Lag BIG Microsoft Business and 2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook and Why Google Worship is a BAD Call in 2008 and Rich Skrenta: Blekko ‘Absurd’ Search Startup Disses King Google

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN