Google and Its Operating Systems
May 19, 2011
Via email I received a spam from Information Week. My goodness the real publishers must be struggling. Spamming me to read articles already identified by my newsreader, various aggregation services, and my own Overflight system. I had seen the story “Google’s Game Changers: Are They Enough”. I just finished my Enterprise Technology Management column for June 2011, and I was surprised at the sharp difference between the “real” journalist’s take and mine.
Here’s what struck me as the core of the big time publication’s approach:
Wise CIOs won’t make bets based on what they desire, but on the desire of their customers–both internal and external. Employees and customers want iPads and iPhones, CIOs want BlackBerries–though maybe that’s less true today, as evidenced by the explosion of the mobile device management market. Today, Google falls somewhere in between.
The article mixes up technology, users, and “desires”.
Not me. I think the Google play at its Google I/O conference revealed three things. None of these was the pivot point of the Information Week write up.
First, Google is throwing lots of stuff against the wall. The problem is that much of the “stuff” is like a poorly baked cupcake. The surface looks good but the center is a moist sticky mess. How much of the “new” is ready for use by consumers or professionals in an organization. Most of the announcements are in the “will be coming soon” category. The reality is more of the creative chaos that has cost Google its brand leadership and its cachet.
Second, the cloud which Google makes as the centerpiece of its “coming soon” or “to be” services is not ready for prime time. Didn’t Blogger.com, Google’s cloud based blogging service, crash during the Google I/O conference? Didn’t cloud leader Amazon fail a week earlier. The fallout from the Sony fiasco and the flame out of the Microsoft hosted Exchange service take place during the Google I/O conference. If these events did not bring a dose of reality to the “to be” services, I missed it.
Finally, the momentum in online is, in my opinion, not Google’s. Sure, Google is a big company, but the action is not the Wal-Mart type of bargain hunting or the frantic attempt to catch up with Apple. The direction is for organizations to look for a balance of open source, hosted, and traditional on premises and proprietary services. The key is “balance”. A massive knee jerk shift toward the future or away from the past is not in the cards in the next 12 months, maybe even longer. The reason: risk and concern about costs.
The fact that Google is competing with itself is of little interest to me. Google, like Microsoft, is less like a battleship and more like 10,000 sail boats generally trying to go in the same direction. Collisions are inevitable. The important issue to me is the context in which companies and consumers operate.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2011
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