On Thursday, Google unveiled it's Apps Premier suite to challenge Microsoft. With this, they have strategically tried to enter the paid software market. Wainewright says -

Today may go down in history as the day when Google started charging for applications. Suddenly, it's once again become acceptable to charge customers for using Web-hosted software. It's as if the dot-com era never happened.

Unlike Microsoft’s products, which reside on PCs and corporate networks, Google Apps’ will be delivered as services accessible over the Internet, with Google storing the data. That will allow businesses to offload some of the cost of managing computers and productivity software.

What is on Google's mind? Where is it going?

If you think that Google has plenty of visionaries busy weaving the nitty-gritties of their future aspirations and architecting the direction, then you are wrong. They have some smart people who rely on "Not intelligent designs but Intelligent reaction". Few months back, Adam Bosworth (Google's VP Engg) explained this to the enthusiastic SalesForce team. So, they don't build things people don't ask for - thus allowing them to decide.

This focus helped Google to improve its Forbes rating this month.

The company is starting to pay more attention to its side projects, investing time and money in those with promise and discarding others.

Google's decision to move towards the "Hosted Services" model based on subscription fee adds credence to the SaaS concept. SaaS - allows companies to focus on business and not on infrastructure. Instead of having to focus on the technology - installing, maintaining, etc. - they can use hosted services that just work.

I believe Google has been underplaying it's ambitions for all these none-core projects until now. And in a few months, we might see huge strides and swings towards the enterprise space and the new model of subscription based, on-demand services.

Labels: Apps, Google, Hosted Services, SaaS

This entry was posted by Nawal Kishore Lodha, on Monday, February 26, 2007. You can leave your response.