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Exciting times for CIOs and business executives – real options from both Microsoft and Google to support their information workers.

For those brought up on Microsoft, with what seems like unlimited (if somewhat daunting) functionality in the Office suite, it always seems that the Google Apps suite is ‘dumbed down’ – you are required to give up some functionality.   On the other hand it may seem like nearly everything you actually  need to do can be done in Google Apps – and there’s less to learn.

The cloud seems to have caught fire.  Microsoft has been pushing aggressively on its BPOS offering and the pricing has become a lot sharper.  Meanwhile Google has been busily beefing up its sales and support resources around Google Apps.

Either way both offerings have many attractions for the CIO – in terms of taking away headaches around upgrades, storage, support, etc.

And both offer lots of functionality in the collaboration type space – wikis, blogs, etc.

Side by side with this there are all the other players e.g. zoho with a very comprehensive offering for the information worker – also priced on a subscription basis.  And for project management basecamp seems to be getting a great deal of traction.  And one goes back to the previous thought – are some of these simpler, built for the cloud, product offerings easier to use, if somewhat ‘dumbed down’?

Interesting piece in Forbes re Google, ‘When Google runs your life’.  Seems to me that no more than Microsoft pushing wall-to-wall MS, Google is inevitably pushing google wall-to-wall.  Apologies for unfortunate use of outdated imagery – probably should be cloud-2-cloud.

I think much of the elegance of the web 2.0 applications has been their simplicity and ease of use.  That has driven initial uptake. Products such as googlewave, in trying to deliver a very rich solution, risk contradicting some of this.  There are similar risks in any vendor looking to achieve cloud-2-cloud dominance.

Seems to me that what the internet and the cloud  should be offering – as they evolve – are  easier and more effective ways to access resources (people, knowledge) – both inside and outside the organisation in which you work/ study/ volunteer.  Cloud based computing is part of this.  I think as such the winning solutions may be ones built from scratch for the cloud, expecting to coexist in the cloud, not expecting to dominate.

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Where would we be without google (search)?  It has opened up a world of information for all of us.   But what now as twitter gets a real foothold.  It feels a little like the difference between listening to an hourly nes bulletin and reading a daily newspaper.  Perhaps with Google I can find the more comprehensive and more considered answer.  But with twitter I feel like I ma getting the current answer – like a news alert.

Interesting times.  Particularly becasue the nature of search/ research is changing – as web 3.0/ semantic web emerges.  Google, as expected, has been quick to look to leverage more effective ways of searching/ indexing data.  But these techniques are also availabel to twitter.

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Commented previously on Google and books. Within this context this article  from the New York Review of Books should be read for a more detailed background understanding.

Am surprised there has been so little comment in the press.

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The developments in copyright and online books are well decribed in last week’s Irish Times by Karlin Lillington.  We seem to be well down the road towards having access to all books in online format via Google – except where authors specifically exclude their books from being available online.

Perhaps this is a good thing – and will increase global learning?

Seems to me that this is destined to change, forever, the book and publishing industry.  Online book shops – e.g. Amazon – have already had a major impact on the industry e.g. on local bookshops.

I have commented previously on the challenges faced by the newspaper industry.  This is going to drive more change in the book industry -regardless of any revenue sharing models.

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The offerings are global – and available (Amazon, Google, Salesforce, etc.).  There are attractions particularly in terms of avoiding major capital expenditure, scaling the infrastructure investment as demand for the business application grows. The 'private cloud' is now also an option.  There are concerns – how do I pick the right vendor, will it prove expensive in the long run?  However it seems to me that for a country like Ireland and for entrepreneurs here trying to build out businesses to kickstart our serious challenged economy, cloud computing offers a great way to push forward, with limited capital outlay but all the scalability to build web/ global business.

Dion Hinchcliffe's well thought out piece provides a more comprehensive list of some of the pros & cons.  Time to move forward.

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Attended great presentation by David Chappell at Microsoft in Dublin this morning.  Fascinating comparison of the offerings from SalesForce, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.  Interesting explanation of Microsoft's focus on providing a platform in this version of Azure to enable us to build the next 'Facebook'. 

Explained why cannot migrate classic enterprise applications to this Azure platform.  The Azure platform uses hierarchical database structures (scalable) – not relational database as would be required to support MSQ SQL Server based applications.

Interesting discussion about the difficulties of naming new Microsoft products/ solutions.

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In his article Scott provides very positive feedback on the data storage options with www.azure.com.  While Scott is careful to provide balance in picking out a number of specific strengths of the other reviewed solutions – Amazon and Google – he certainly makes a strong case of azure.  Would depend on what's more important in your own implementation.

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Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media) gave a good key note at the web 2.0 Expo in SF, last month (see presentation).  He has some tendency towards hyperbole e.g. in speaking of Web 2.0 using such phrases as: ‘a turning point akin to literacy, cities…’.  However he has a number of well made and supported points.

The internet becoming ‘the computer’, the ‘global platform’, the trend toward the PC being just another device accessing the internet – is a valid observation.  His phrase ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ has a powerful ring to it.

O’Reilly’s talk focuses on three ideas:

1. Web 2.0 in the enterprise (enterprises opening themselves to the world in new ways)
2. Web 2.0 evolving into cloud computing – the web becomes a reality for business
3. The web, as an artifact of the PC, is going away

O’Reilly’s examples of the use of customer data by companies such as Google and Wesabe to provide relevant applications and services to their customers puts the gaunlet down to other businesses e.g. banks.

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