Google partners with Cap Gemini in corporate desktop push
The Guardian has the rejigged press release:
"Google has linked up with IT consultancy and outsourcing specialist CapGemini to target corporate customers with its range of desktop (er, web) applications, in the search engine's most direct move against the dominance of Microsoft."
UPDATE: there's a great summary by Dan Farber, touching on issues of privacy and entrusting data to Google, which I conveniently forgot about!
Nick Carr has a bit more detail (and quotes the press release a bit more):
"Google Apps simplifies collaboration, particularly between employees working at different companies. With Office and other traditional apps, he says, such collaboration usually entails "lobbing emails over the firewall" with attached files. Such "paper-shuffling" leads to a proliferation of different versions of documents, adding complexity and delays to the process."
Some thoughts:
Massive growth in collaborating outside of the Outlook address book
The ability to collaborate 'outside of the Exchange group' is starting to become a real issue. I see this with clients who've outsourced key business processes, and then hit a wall when it comes to meaningful collaboration with these companies. Or even just effective knowledge sharing - there's a complete failure of any process to manage versioning, for example, if all you're doing is breaking your carefully (and expensively) installed 'knowledge management' system as soon as you include a 'non-employee' in the process.
More nuanced, 'brainstorming' requirement between employees, partners
Hosting spreadsheets and word processing 'between' these organisational groups is an obvious solution - but that focuses on the 'paper shuffling' bit of the process, what about the less structured, but critical brainstorming and idea generation phase? Being able to rapidly share and manage notes from calls, structure ideas and share initial plans is where I think ThinkFold sits...drop me a line if you agree :-)
The spin to IT stakeholders - 'it's for 'low value' employees'
It's fascinating to see how this approach is spun:
"For the near term, Capgemini is pitching Apps largely as a complement to Microsoft Office. Google's package offers two immediate advantages, according to Jones. First, it allows the many thousands of workers who don't have their own PCs or their own copies of Office - from factory hands to call-center agents - to gain access to email, calendars, and other personal-productivity applications."
In other words; 'don't worry too much about this, IT folks, it's just for those low value, high turnover people you don't care about anyway' - the classic spin to insert a paradigm shift under the noses of an increasingly irrelevant IT function.
First, those type of employees have great ideas and knowledge - there's a huge business potential from offering otherwise 'disenfranchised' employees the ability to share their knowledge. And secondly, the 'high-value' HQ based guys are the ones who will also get most value from being able to share, without hassle, across firewalls - you think they'll sit around and carry on emailing Office docs via Exchange when they get wind of this? They're doing this anyway regardless of what IT provides.
Employees already know these apps - they go home every night and fire up gmail accounts, use Google search and Wikipedia - they know how this stuff looks and feels - training and 'change management' will be minimal.
Why it might be too late for Google
I've realised that Microsoft's knowledge sharing/collaboration strategy pitch with SharePoint, is to maintain the paradigm of document (i.e. Office file) creation. That makes sense if maintaining the Office suite and Exchange is a massive cash cow (which it is, for MS).
But as an employee, if I'm going to share my documents through the web, I might as well make them web pages? Physical Office has less and less relevance for me, both as a place and a software suite.
Companies are already solving the 'collaboration outside of the Office suite' problem for themselves, mainly with wiki installs. I think the biggest risk to Google's inroad into corporate IT is that they've targeted MS Office and the document paradigm, but companies have already started moving away from that with wikis.
Of course, Google already has a wiki up it's sleeve - expect to see that launched as part of this partnership.
All links from the mighty TechMeme.
