Google Gears – any guessing who will come next?

Google have announced a platform for building offline capable web applications (Scoble covers the details well). I think everyone has noticed the inherant problem that SaaS desktop applications only work online (in fact, even I posted about offline problems with SaaS a couple of months ago), but this now removes that barrier.

This is a huge deal – it really challenges he traditional software model – and Microsoft must be a little concerned about how this impacts MS Office!

Scoble, also just posted an update that someone else is “going offline” tomorrow. With all the talks of acquisitions lately I’m hoping that it’s salesforce.com. Now that would be something!

<update> So I guess I got that one wrong – looks like Real Networks have taken video content offline. I’d still love to see SFC do the same.

Google, Ireland and Yoshi

Seattle is a wonderful place. It’s been my home for the last four years, and what a four years! I’ve got married, had a son and made many great friends. But with the implending arrival of Yoshi in November (we’ve nick-named him/her Yoshi in honour of the Flaming Lips song, not the Nintendo character of Super Mario fame) we’ve made the decision to return to Europe to be closer to our family.

Never one to make things easy on myself, rather than move back to our home-land (UK) we’re actually going to start afresh in a new country – Ireland. I’ve been offered a job with Google in Dublin, and we’re all very excited to be moving to such a vibrant, friendly and, let’s face it, funky place (Dublin and Google).

We’ll be arriving in Dublin on the 4 July, and I’m sure that I’ll make a post or two on the move.

Organic chocolate ice cream!

I was over at Google’s mountain view campus on Friday, and got to experience their legendary food. It lived up to all expectations – even their vegetarian offerings were amazing. I particularly fell in love with their organic chocolate ice cream! I can see why their engineers would never want to go home.

Software as a Service or Software plus Service?

At the risk of contradicting myself, I think Ray Ozzie is onto something with the Software plus Service approach. 

One of the current issues with SaaS for desktop apps is the lack of support for disconnected users. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Google apps doesn’t have a PowerPoint equivalent yet – how many times have you made last minute changes to your presentation on the plane

“Software plus services” seems to be a sensible choice for desktop applications at this point in time. However, I suspect this will change once we have broadband connections from our aisle seats.

<update> There’s an interesting announcement today from Corel, who seem to have already launched a hybrid software plus service application. 

Google caught in a hailstorm?

With the launch of Google hosted applications that compete with Microsoft Office, it seems natural to look at the history of hosted apps to see if Google Apps will really threaten Microsoft. Mary Jo Foley  compares Google Apps to Microsoft’s 2001 hailstorm service. She has some good points, and anyone launching a hosted service will face the IT department’s resistance to letting go of company data. However, I also think that things have changed significantly in the 6 years since hailstorm and I think that Google will get a much better reception in 2007. So why do I think things will be different this time around?

• The need to share information outside of the corporate network is bigger than ever. In order to do business, companies need to communicate quickly and efficiently with their geographically dispersed colleagues, suppliers, partners and customers. We all know that emailing large spreadsheets around is a poor way to manage information and an efficient alternative will be welcomed by information workers.
• SAAS has also become part of the IT manager’s scorecard. The use of portals, and application servers means that they are used to working with data that sits outside of their control, so the tight grip on company data is loosening slightly.
• There are clear precedents for outsourced applications (the obvious one being salesforce.com, whose subscribers only really started to take off in 2004/5).
• And finally, I’ve seen a huge change in the way that IT is adopted by companies. BlackBerries, iPods and RSS all began their life in the hands of the end-user, and IT departments had to adapt to the ever increasing demands of their clients. IT departments are becoming more service oriented (I wonder if this has anything to do with the increased offshoring of IT). And if they’re not service oriented, then users are willing to go elsewhere. (I’ve just got off the phone from a client who was complaining that it took 6 months for their internal IT team to update the fields of one of her databases. She’s now looking to outsource it (and host it externally) so that she can get more responsive updates.

That’s not to say that Google Apps is going to have it easy. Attitudes towards enterprise outsourcing are changing, as the business benefits become clearer, but there still a long way to go before the default choice is to rent your application over the internet.

Has Google won the SAAS prize?

There’s an article in the Economist this week that paints a convincing picture of outsourcing your email (and Office applications) to Google. The software as a service trend is no longer on the fringe, and with Googles agressive aquisitions they’ve got to be a real threat not just to Microsoft, but to anyone who is building software as a packaged product.

Do any of you have experience of GMail, salesforce.com or another SAAS, and if so how did it compare to your desktop experience?

I think we can all see where this is going…

So I’m taking bets on the next application to be relased by Google. See if you can spot a trend – first there was Gmail (Web email), then they bought Writely (Web word processor) and now they launch Google Calendar. Anyone want to take a bet on numsum (online spreadsheet) being Google’s next purchase?

I’m off to buy the GoogleOffice.com domain name 😉