I think that this article from “Forbes” is quite interesting!!!i attach the whole article
Quentin Hardy, 12.10.09, 08:40 PM EST
Forbes Magazine dated December 28, 2009
Your day begins with a wake-up call from your Google Android phone. As you run to the shower, you hit Google News and check headlines, then Gmail. Your first appointment of the day has been moved to a new location; Google Maps will direct you there. Quickly update your expense report–including the printout of that sales presentation using, say, Google Template–and shoot them to the back office in India (in Hindi, if you prefer, with Google Translate). Your boss wants to discuss your group’s contributions to some marketing documents? Lean on Google Groups. You’re not even out the door yet. You have the rest of the day to search for work-critical information on the Web while you’re at the office–to say nothing of snatching a few moments to download a game, check stock prices, organize your medical records, share photos and pick a restaurant and movie for the evening. How convenient.
And a little creepy, perhaps. Google ( GOOG – news - people ) wants to own your every waking minute online–at home, while in transit, at your workplace, wherever you happen to be. It makes connectivity oh so easy, on a desktop, laptop or mobile phone. How much easier via a little-known business called Google Applications that allows us to instantly share Google calendars, spreadsheets, memos, reports, e-mail, corporate blogs, presentations and more–much, much more–by storing them in Google’s enormous data centers. These bundled office-suite services make Google money on subscriptions, but they are also something of a Trojan horse to pull more people onto the Internet so that Google can make even more money from ads. By expanding what kinds of information people organize and share, as well as what they search, Google makes users ever more dependent on it to get through the day. But just who is in control here?
Eric Schmidt, Google’s owlish chief, sounds so reasonable. “Our model is just better,” he says. “Based on that, we should have 100% share.” As for that other company battling to take over your online life? Microsoft ( MSFT – news - people ) “has many issues, including fixing the problems with their products,” says Schmidt.
Microsoft isn’t exactly rolling over. It’s getting a boost from the early success of its search engine, Bing, and Windows 7; Office 2010, with a Web-based version of its software, looks promising. Recent discussions with News Corp. ( NWS – news - people ) about paying for content and blocking that content from Google demonstrate Microsoft’s eagerness to challenge Google on every front.
The three-year-old business of Google Apps is easy to miss, given the long shadow of the company’s online ad business, which has 60% of its market and will pull in the bulk of Google’s $22 billion in revenue this year. Off to the side will be another $750 million or so largely from sales of Google Apps to corporations for $50 per user per year, a fraction of what Microsoft Office sells for. But Schmidt’s vision is about more than money. As Apps becomes tied to a Google computer operating system (Chrome OS), Google mobile computing (Android) and Google’s application-friendly Web browser (Chrome), it promises–or threatens–to reshape both the tech landscape and the way we work and play.
Google’s Chrome Web browser is designed not just to connect your computer to the Internet. It will also let Google Apps operate even when you’re not online, just the way Office does. Google is developing an operating system slated to appear a year from now in netbook computers that will cost under $300 (maybe even free, with an App subscription) and be dedicated to the Chrome browser. This new netbook goes from off to online in ten seconds. A recent demo of Chrome OS featured the Pandora online music player, a service that allows you to name your favorite music, then sends you tunes similar to what you apparently like (based on roughly 400 attributes) and enables the creation of 100 personal “stations.” Android, an open-source mobile phone operating system introduced in October on a new line from Motorola ( MOT – news - people ), brings with it a small universe of Google computing power, including new gps navigation systems with such features as predicting traffic congestion.
Let Google own your digital life, every last bit of it? Such a life would have its attractions. No longer would your data be inconveniently out of reach–your boss has an urgent question when you’re home, but the spreadsheet with the answer is at the office. No longer would you get pestered with notices on your PC to download an operating system upgrade or extend the subscription on your Web security. You wouldn’t worry much if your computer got stolen or fell into the bathtub; with a low price and little personal data on the machine, these netbooks may be like office furniture–if one breaks, you toss it aside and pull another from the closet. Your employer might be thrilled to move its data processing into the cloud (see related story, “Virtualization Versus the Cloud”), since that would mean savings on computer support staff.
Possible downside: You have to have complete and total faith in the company running the data repository. What if someone hacked in and got your tax return?
From 25 people in 2004, Google now has 1,000 of its 20,000 employees working on enterprise products, largely Apps. Four hundred are engineers; most of the rest are involved in sales and support, a high proportion at engineer-dominated Google. The enterprise is still dwarfed by Microsoft, which makes $19 billion from the office suite. Still, 2 million businesses have signed on to use Google software in its short life, drawn by cost, speed, collaboration and control. Most customers are tiny, but they include 15,000 workers at Genentech ( DNA – news - people ), 35,000 at Britain’s Rentokil Initial ( RTOKY.PK – news - people ), a business services outfit, and 30,000 in the Los Angeles government.
In a notable experiment Genentech bought both Apps and Office for all employees. Roughly 2,800, or 40%, of its workers who rely on business applications the most have migrated to Apps. The company says it has saved money on hardware and support staff from just that crossover. Genentech asked Google for features like a calendar that could handle large meetings, sorting out rooms and audiovisual needs, meetings for more than 1,000 employees at a time–700 additions in all. “They knocked them all out in a couple of months,” says Todd Pierce, chief information officer at Genentech. “We ran it for 90 days to make sure the bugs were out, then moved 2.5 million items off the Microsoft calendar over a weekend, losing just 80 items.” Pierce requested 15,000 dummy log-ins to make simultaneous requests to the system. “They gave them to me in a couple of hours,” he says. “If you were testing Microsoft or [IBM's] Lotus, you’d need several weeks and several hundred thousand dollars in servers.”
By selling on price, convenience and features, the Apps archipelago promises a potentially new kind of computing ecosystem, as different as personal computers were from mainframes. The Silicon Valley rush to cloud computing focuses mainly on cost saving, but that aspect of it misses the importance of creating and consuming information that’s continually updated, commented on by others and accessible anywhere. There are no files or folders; just reliance on what Google loves best–search.
Search can throw off a variety of software goodies from Google. Already, a multinational can send Gmail between, say, the Berlin office and San Francisco, and the German on one end will end up as English at the other, thanks to Google Translate, which was built for foreign Web pages. Need to meet someone who contacted you by e-mail? Links to Google maps and your calendar can help you pinpoint a where and a when. All of Apps probably takes up less than 1% of Google’s data centers, which have a million-plus servers. Needless to say, Google’s hoard ($22 billion in cash as of Sept. 30) means the company will be refining Apps for the ten years or so Schmidt says he will need to bring it to its full power.
“Apps is search masquerading as collaboration,” says Douglas Merrill, a Princeton-trained psychologist and Google’s former chief information officer, who is writing a book on how search-centric computing changes our lives. “It is a behavioral change in how we view the world–a way to survive amid information overload.” It could also mean more Big Brother in our lives, thanks to customizations that let corporate bosses monitor how workers spend their time.
Born in Washington, D.C., Schmidt, 54, studied electrical engineering at Princeton and computers at uc, Berkeley, where his doctoral work involved tinkering with the open-source Unix operating system. One of the key points was the importance of sharing information and developing collaborative feedback loops to improve performance. That evolving concern with the growing power of networks–coupled with a fiercely competitive drive honed on a hardening hatred of Microsoft–has shaped his professional life. One executive who has worked closely with Schmidt calls Microsoft his “white whale.”
Joining Sun Microsystems ( JAVA – news - people ) in 1983 as chief technical officer, Schmidt oversaw development of the Java programming language, which allows the same type of computer program to run on many different kinds of computers, just as the Internet was taking off. Schmidt was initially shy but came to love public speaking, partly by evangelizing for Java. He led a three-month project to embed a version of Java into the browsers made by Netscape Communications, an early browser company. Microsoft crushed Netscape with its Internet Explorer browser and squeezed Sun with a version of its server software.
In 1997 Schmidt left to head Novell ( NOVL – news - people ). A powerhouse in corporate networking, the Orem, Utah company had also been sideswiped by a Microsoft offering that came with a lot more features and ties to other products. Novell countered by trying to add its own Apps business, but its $1.5 billion acquisition of WordPerfect Corp. proved a botched affair. Three days after Schmidt started the job he was told that an expected $20 million profit on the quarter was really a $20 million loss. He fired 1,000-plus people and logged 250,000 miles a year selling Novell’s software, overseeing a return to its core directory business. Novell’s stock rose sevenfold, only to collapse amid the dot-com bust and continued onslaughts by Microsoft.
Schmidt came to Google in early 2001, when it had fewer than 300 employees. The company’s venture capitalists wanted an experienced chief executive. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had built an impressive search engine, based on Linux. They gave away search to consumers and watched how they used it, tinkering with the engine based on their feedback. Slim revenues came from corporate purchases of search. Undisciplined though they were, Schmidt bonded with Brin and Page, traveling with them to Burning Man, a kind of geek performance-art hoedown held annually in the Nevada desert. Luckily he also defended their insistence in the face of VC pressure that Google hold on to its consumer search business when it made no money; the backers wanted the company to focus on corporate search. Schmidt recruited much of the group that made Adwords, Google’s feedback-based ad auction system. In the 2004 public offering Brin, Page and Schmidt held on to most of Google’s B shares, giving them inordinate voting power. (As of Nov. 20 holdings by the trio were worth, respectively, $18.2 billion, $18.2 billion and $6.4 billion.)
Behind the scenes Apps was taking shape. Google’s young engineers were tinkering with corporate e-mail applications. They came up with software that took e-mail and made it easier to search and filter. Over time this became the Internet-based Gmail, which was released to the world on Apr. 1, 2004 (many thought it was a prank). Inside Google techies despised an Oracle Corp. ( ORCL – news - people ) calendar that could not be shared or easily transported in and out of the company, and so built an online version, Google Calendar, released to company insiders around the end of the year.
That was Schmidt’s eureka moment. “The calendar was a real insight to me,” he recalls. “It
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