JotSpot To Surface & Other Google Musings

Good News:

Google is adding JotSpot, which the company acquired in October 2006, to the Google Apps, according to Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise. Google Apps currently includes mail, calendar, instant messaging, Web page creation, documents and spreadsheets.

JotSpot will bring wikis and easy to build team Web sites to the suite. The company has been in the process of moving JotSpot to the Google infrastructure to gain reliability and scale efficiencies, Girouard said, but he didn’t disclose when JotSpot would become available.

I was beginning to think that Google had lost where it had put JotSpot. The wiki capability is badly needed in Apps. It will be interesting to see the level of integration when JotSpot does become available. I will also be interested to see how well JotSpot handles attachments and related content/records management needs for enterprise users.

Same Old News:

He predicted that in the next ten years it won’t make sense for people to build their own data centers. “It’s like building individual power plants and having a vice president of electricity, he explained, channeling some of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s best lines.

Girouard cited Amazon’s cloud computing effort, EC2, as a way to get scale and the cost advantage of software-as-a-service without signing up for any particular application. He said that people have been asking Google about running their applications an VMware on Google’s infrastructure.

Not much new here. Telling old stories in new ways (with new jokes perhaps).

Future News:

I asked Girouard about Google becoming an infrastructure provider: “We have no plan, we are not actively working on it, but we are courting developers who want to build applications that run on Google. Gadgets have that utility flavor,” he said.

Perhaps the worst-kept secret - clearly Google will become an application platform over time.

Misleading News:

“IT people have valid concerns. Some are based on real logic and some is cultural,” Girouard said regarding companies who are hesitant to give their data to the cloud. “It’s not true that because information is stored in the cloud that it is less secure. It will be more secure than what you could do yourself for every scenario.”

Under "every scenario" - really? Then why does the "small print" often let Google wiggle out of being held accountable and responsible for security or other compliance breaches? I so love it when SaaS vendors tell you how secure they are - and proceed to "run for the hills" when it comes to standing beside you in court (or in front of some other agency sitting in judgement) when someone is about to rule ( and perhaps apply financial or other penalties) to your organization regarding a particular security breach or data leak or related privacy/compliance matter.

Until Google and other SaaS vendors really stand-up and walk-the-talk (by putting their money and resources where their marketing is), people should continue to think in terms of a hybrid model. Use "the cloud" when the cloud makes sense. Don't use it when the risk cannot be managed in a way that satisfied enterprise stakeholders.

» JotSpot joining Google Apps revolution | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Comments

[Vladimir Miloushev]

Perhaps the story of JotSpot illustrates best why Google is unlikely to become a utility provider. Their grid architecture is so different from any other execution environment that "porting" an application to the Google grid is more like re-writing it.

Perhaps the more relevant question is, can the Web 2.0 / SaaS model support innovation and scaling at the same time? Think about this: Google has market reach, mindshare and power comparable only to Microsoft as it was 15 years ago. Yet 15 years ago, when Microsoft wanted to bring a new application in front of 100 million users, all they needed to do is to write the app for a single PC, include it on the Windows distribution disk and put an icon for it on the desktop. It was the rest of the industry - all the HPs, Compaqs, Dells, Acers, etc. of the world that made sure that the new PC you and I bought came with this app preinstalled and ready for us to click. Google, on the other side, has to figure out all by their lonely self how to serve every app to 100 million concurrent users over the net.

I hope I am wrong, but it sure feels like the need to scale every piece of code to millions of users is beginning to slow down the rate of advance in technology. Google is now 10 years old. When Microsoft was 10 years old, they were able to change their whole architecture and code base on the way from DOS to Windows and Office. In the next 15 years, from 1985 to 2000, being already a huge and mature company, they moved from 16-bit Windows to 32-bit Windows 98 to Windows NT. That's three separate OS architectures in 15 years - one every 5 years.

And Microsoft was not the only large company capable of this - it took Sun less than 5 years to transition from a maker of pizza-box workstations to an enterprise server company, and Apple just did it with the iPod. For some reason, I just don't see the evidence of this rate of change in Google, Yahoo, eBay, Salesforce.com or any other of the large web companies - each of them is doing today pretty much what they were doing in 1999/2000.