Google And The Enterprise

Google has done an amazing job of capturing the imagination, and more importantly the search queries, of hundreds of millions of web surfers. Google has also turned that attention into a huge source of revenues with which they have built one of the world's great technology companies.

But if former Microsoft employee and veteran search watcher Robert Scoble is correct is his assessment which is the same as many other analysts, Google is now beginning a fairly aggressive push to go after the enterprise market - a market dominated by Microsoft products. Scoble thinks Google CEO Eric Schmidt is basically on a five year plan to take over from Microsoft as the enterprise software leader.

Google's strategy to take over the corporate enterprise space is intriguing because it is based on the idea of providing high quality, well engineered software along with a massive cloud computing network at little or no cost to companies. Although there are some small charges for a handful of Google applications most Google applications - such custom search, gmail, Google spreadsheets and documents, and blogging tools - are free for the taking. All of these can easily be scaled up and adapted to many enterprise computing tasks such as document collaboration.