DC Gets Googley
October 14, 2008
I have a long history with Washington, DC. I attended Oxen Hill Maryland’s elementary school. After attending university as a dull normal goose, I worked at the nuclear unit of Halliburton and later at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Then in 2000, I had some work for a little-known Federal agency.
To be candid, I never think of Washington, DC and Google as synonymous. Nevertheless, Ars Technica here educated me in the tie up. David Chartier’s “Washington DC Latest to Drop Microsoft for Web Apps” explains that the government of the District of Columbia has embraced the GOOG. The story struck me as out of sync with Microsoft’s paid listing on Techmeme here. Microsoft’s Channel 10 here asserts that Microsoft is doing “the coolest things”. “Cool” obviously means one thing on the left coast and another in the right coast’s District of Columbia.
For me, the most interesting statement in Mr. Chartier’s useful write up was:
The deal will provide District employees with applications like Gmail for communication, Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, the recently launched Google Video for business, and Google Sites to wrap it all together with intranets and wikis.
I have heard that the Google Search Appliance has planted its cute self on premises as well. My take is that Google is plugging along, sucking in universities (San Jose State), school districts (New South Wales and 1.5 million users), and city governments (the District of Columbia). These “wins” are trivial, probably not even significant in Google’s ad revenue, but these are significant for two reasons: one, the camel has its nose under the Microsoft tent and two, Google can say with a straight face, “these are not enterprise applications.” Baloney. Google is implementing the ink spot tactic; that is, a drip and then with each cycle more of the white space gets colored with Google’s cheery blues and yellows. The red is a reminder of the red ink the company is going to spill over the balance sheets of those firms who insist on telling me that Google is a search and ad company.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2008
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