Editor's Corner

There's been a whole lot of talk about Google this week and I thought that it might be worthwhile to do a little recap of the story most relevant to the enterprise: Google's formal entry into the Office 2.0 market and subsequently, the enterprise market (the long forgotten Google Search Appliance notwithstanding). People have been hyping the concept of Office 2.0 for a while now but Google is the first major player to make waves in the space. And if anyone has the market savvy and financial muscle to sell a concept like web-based productivity apps, it's that company with the funny name and the rainbow-colored logo.

Sure, Google's Writely and Spreadsheets are currently little more than an experiment: Interesting applications with innovative features that power users will want to play around with. "No one is going to switch over to Google Docs for work, though!" you say, in the most skeptical tone you can muster. Right you are, but you'd be shortsighted if you didn't see the writing on the wall: A new model is being proposed for the way that we work and the battle for your desktop is coming, sooner than you think.

In this corner, weighing in at 8000 pounds, we've got the pride of Redmond, Washington: Microsoft! While Windows is undoubtedly the company's most lucrative product, there's no overlooking Microsoft's undisputed dominance of the productivity software market for both Windows and OS X users. Microsoft makes a pretty penny selling its Office suite to businesses of all sizes and you can bet that they'll work as hard as they can to integrate online collaboration features--I'm going to go ahead and say it: the killer app of the future--into upcoming revisions of the software. But will the northwestern giant be able to adapt quickly enough? Much like the bloated Windows, Office has become a pain for Microsoft's programmers, taking years to revise the code for each new version. While the company has released a Beta of Live Writer, it's anyone's guess as to when this functionality will be integrated into Word (which is not to mention the rest of the Office suite). Here's a hint: it won't be any time soon.

Meanwhile, we've got Google and their limited yet promising Google Docs. As it stands, Google docs can read files in the .doc and .xls file formats, offers online collaborative tools and boasts an attractive user interface. While Microsoft has been taking baby steps into the world of Office 2.0, Google has moving forward by leaps and bounds: announcing a set of APIs that will allow other developers to plug their own applications into the framework of Docs, courting the education sector and revealing planned Gmail integration for future versions of the software. Make no mistake: Google is moving into the enterprise sector and they're giving it everything they've got.

What's most threatening to the status quo is that Google is essentially proposing an entirely new business model: Use Google Docs for free, store your files for free on Google's servers and access them from wherever you want. All Google wants is your attention; their revenue comes not from the software but from the ads that flank it. While this is certainly an attractive proposition for some, will this radical strategy attract enterprise customers? I can't name any enterprises that would allow their employees to store confidential information on someone else's server, no matter how "non-evil" Google claims to be. Lest we forget, this is the same company that has professed their desire to control all of the world's information.

What I expect, however, is that as Google Docs becomes more robust and attractive to the enterprise, Google will offer more options for storing files and accessing their software. Will IT departments be able to run a version of Google Docs on a local secure server? Will Google sell a "Google Docs Appliance" that integrates into your network? Google has proven nothing but savvy in the past and rest assured, they're considering these issues as we speak. I wouldn't be too surprised if in ten years, we're all using Google software to perform our mundane, daily tasks. Ultimately, Google's entry into the enterprise sector might prove far more important than their acquisition of some website that streams videos of amateur karaoke wannabes.

Finally, I hope you haven't forgotten about our wVoIP executive summit next month, in sunny San Francisco. Converged services are coming in a big way and here's your chance to get in on the ground floor: learn all about the new tech and the advanced functionality that it can bring to your enterprise. Today is the last day for pre-registration and if you register now, you can use the promotional code "MEHAN" to receive an additional $300 off of the cost of registration--that's a total of $600 in savings. This is really a terrific value for anyone who's involved in enterprise networking, so please click on over to our wVoIP site and have a look for yourself. -Mehan