Patty Seybold on Office 2.0
Link: Outside Innovation: GOOGLE: THE CAMEL’S NOSE IN BUSINESS SOFTWARE?.
Will small businesses and mid-size companies begin to question the wisdom of paying a full-time email maintenance staff to keep their email lifeline flowing, when they can avail themselves of "free" (easy-to-use email, calendaring, Web page creation, and hosting, etc.) from Google? You bet!
Will large companies move their employees off of Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes to Google Apps and Gmail? Probably not.
But will large companies allow employees to use Gmail as a back-up email alternative for situations in which their corporate email is compromised by virus attacks or inaccessible? Absolutely!
Maybe true, but there is a third way between "big companies won’t migrate off exchange" and "small companies will use this as a cheap alternative to enterprise software." It’s "individual professionals will adopt cheap or free tools to realize productivity gains, and to heck with what the IT guys say the corporate standard is."
I was working at a company a while back that tried to migrate everybody off AIM and onto a secure IM client. That initiative went nowhere; individual users were so far ahead of the corporate IT team that it was easier for them to just install the free AIM client and use that. When a few key adopters installed AIM and used it, more people installed it because their co-workers were using it, and it was only a matter of time before AIM became an unassailable folk standard within the company.
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re: IT “corporate standards”, and AIM in particular: Jeffrey, you’ve just described at least three bands of corporate IT yutzen I’ve had the joy of working with in the past few years.
The last group, after realizing, and I wonder how long it took them to find out, that blocking access to AIM sent a bunch of people to the web site to use *that* interface, announced their intention of blocking access to all website that weren’t explicitly called out on their approved list. Engineering already had their plans to bypass IT’s latest insanity within the day.
What’s so appealing about web-based apps to the modern coureur de bois is that they are for the most part platform independent. That means I can still do my work even when I’m waiting for 15 levels of mgmt sign-off so I can have the “corporate standard” installed on the “corporate standard” computer on my desk. That, for some reason, is awfully threatening to the corporate-types…..
The legal environment evolves even more slowly than corporate IT, and corporate IT, while also often bound by ill-considered bureaucracy, is also accountable to legal review that individual professionals may skirt, but corporate IT cannot.
My hope is for a synthesis, which is something like ‘Corporate IT will learn to more efficiently recognize the self-discovering efficiences of a work force and accelerate their adoption to the benefit of all.’
One of the biggest issues has to do with customer data confidentiality, at least in certain industries, and the legal and regulatory requirements that corporations must meet — and by extension, individual professionals must meet as well. ARguably, the existence of ‘corporate standards’ is there to protect the individual professional from personal liability.
I’m sure there are folks who have thought about this and have solutions. looking forward to finding out more about them.
The other core issue is what you described previously here: http://mcmanus.typepad.com/grind/2006/06/consumer_is_the.html , the difference between the enterprise market, where the consumer is not the customer, and way too often, the customer is not a consumer. In essence, where the enterprise decision-makers learn to delegate, or who to recognize the benefit of letting the consumer be more of a customer, but aggregated.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the link to my recent post about Google as the Camel’s nose. Your observations and experience serve to shore up my argument that “lead users” will begin stampeding away from “enterprise-IT-blessed” solutions.
I am also interested in any comments you have about my point–a bit later in the post–that Google is more likely to attract “business” users to its Gadgets/Content and customizable business home pages then Yahoo! has done. Frankly, I’m looking for the right set of tools to enable business users to develop their own mash ups for other business users to use. Yahoo! and Apple seem to attract mostly consumer apps. I’m betting that Google will become the platform/environment that people use to aggregate business apps.
Patty
Yahoo tried to bring products and services to business users in the 90s and was unsuccessful there. My sense is that it will be some time before they go down that path again.
I look at a developer ecosystem as being a pyramid with open tools/products at its base and a combination of technical and nontechnical initiatives (such as documentation, evangelism, the ability to commercialize an application built on the platform, a thriving community, and good two-way communication with developer customers) at the top. Google is doing an OK job with the base, but doesn’t do a terrific job with the other stuff.
In the near term I see a whole bunch of so-called “Office 2.0″ companies filling the gap. At some point companies like Google, Adobe and Microsoft will see value there and start to snap these companies up. But you can’t acquire the kind of culture that you need to make this happen, you have to grow it.