For the first time, I'm starting to fear a bit about the innovation path for the Google Apps product lines. The last seven days have seen the release of two features that seem to show a gentle tacking towards turning the platform into an infrastructure to support more established Microsoft product lines: Google Cloud Connect allows MS Office to save in MS document formats directly to the Google Docs environment, and yesterday the facility to buy additional storage capacity was released.
The work that we have been doing in recent months using native Google Documents had been producing some incredible results. The key conceptual difference with what had gone before is that rather than dealing with multiple copies of files, Docs are web-based objects that multiple people can manipulate. This is a subtle difference that can produce some startling improvements in team working productivity.
The challenge is that, because the products look a bit like the established Office suite, there is a bit of a learning curve. The easiest way around that is to remove it… embed some of the functionality into established tools. That is what Cloud Connect does, and as a result removes most of what makes Google Docs a better product.
Innovation is really hard to pull off. Think about the IT tools that you use today, and how few them are anything but crazily-extended metaphors from the pre-digital era: word processor = typewriter; spreadsheet = ledger book; presentation tool = OHP; email = memos and so the list goes on. Innovation is even harder in established markets, and market dominance has usually been attained through incremental rather than revolutionary change: Excel and Word trumped Lotus and WordPerfect with better versions of the same.
Also at play at Google Enterprise is the impact of bringing in lots of people from the established software industry. They, I am sure, have exacting sales targets, and so will bring in experience of what has worked for them before. Again, this is likely to see less, rather than more, innovation.
I hope I am wrong, because collaboration tools that are commonly in use in organisations today often are more likely to inhibit rather than facilitate team working (ask most people in most organisations what is top of their list of things that get in the way of their day-to-day work, and most will respond "email"). There is a huge need for substantial innovation for IT to not be thrown to the wind by Facebook and Twitter. Turning Google Docs into a poor man's Sharepoint isn't the answer.
mmitII 