Rumor or Revisionism: Google to the Cloud!

June 23, 2012

I read with some amusement “Google to launch Amazon, Microsoft cloud rival at Google I/O.” The main idea is that Google is going to roll out cloud services to compete with Amazon but really the purpose is to compete with Microsoft. Read the GigaOM “real” journalist story and decide what is being reported.

My view is that Google has been a cloud vendor from its earliest days. In The Google Legacy I described some Google research which made Google the “cloud” and everything thing was within Google. I did a briefing for some wild and crazy telecommunications folks in which a diagram showed that a telecommunications partner offering Internet service would have content and services delivered from the Google cloud. Sharply reduced latency was part of the plan. Google served the digital goods from its servers to which the telco partner would be party to the plan.

The date? 2004. My sources included information dating back to 2001.

Google in the cloud? Yep. What seems to be mesmerizing folks is that Google may make a public announcement. Be still my heart.

My question remains: Why has Google delayed bundling its cloud services for years. The foot dragging allowed Amazon to deploy most of the services with which  Google engineers were fiddling.

A second question: Why has Google not moved enterprise search to the cloud? Google touts that it is a hardware company, but the Google Search Appliance is out of phase with the shift some firms are making to hosted or cloud services.

My hunch as a non journalist is that Google does not have the ability to execute and, thus, finds itself tagging along after others are in the market and enjoying a modicum of success.

Why? What about management? What about the ability to do something about market trends before those trends ossify? Honk. (If you want to receive our free, registration required newsletter Honk!, write thehonk at yandex dot com. I am more blunt in the original essay which is distributed every Tuesday at 7 am Eastern.)

Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2012

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Comments

One Response to “Rumor or Revisionism: Google to the Cloud!”

  1. full coverage dental insurance on September 13th, 2012 12:21 pm

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts about search.
    Regards

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