Google Really Advertises That It Sells Enterprise-Ready Systems
October 5, 2009
Short honk: Google is now advertising its products and services. Okay, I know it was tough to miss the full page ads I spotted in my traditional hard copy newspaper today. You can read a news story about this new initiative by the Google in “Google Goes Global with Apps”. I think this is an interesting step. I learned last week that in the United Kingdom some organizations have been able to telephone Google and speak with a sales person. I find this a dramatic change from the grousing of those who tried to contact Google and could not. My take is that Google may be taking a more professional approach to marketing and customer contact. After 11 years, that’s a needed change. However, Google has a long way to go before it can join the ranks of the enterprise software marketing masters. Oracle and Salesforce.com are as far ahead of the Google in selling as Google is ahead of other Web search vendors in search. Catching up will take time and be costly. In some markets, Google may not be able to close the gap with the Microsoft enterprise marketing machine in my opinion for years. It is tough to make up for 11 years of making the customers jump through hoops to get attention and support. The trick at Google is to get a real live engineer on a product team, not just the marketing or sales engineer. My hunch is that today’s marketing push focuses on reaching the public facing folks at Google. The wizards remain behind a barricade.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2009
I wish someone had paid me to offer this opinion.
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