Here are a few audio snippets from a Q and A session with the president of Google’s Enterprise division, Dave Girouard. The session took place on August 5th at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado.
Girouard talks about Cloud Computing, Google’s new App Engine, the Google Apps productivity suite, competition versus partnerships, and how Google faces the challenges of protecting its users’ privacy and security.
Q: How does Google define Cloud Computing?
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Q: Why do you think Gmail is getting more adoption than the other Google Apps products? How do you define the competition for Gmail?
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Q: Is there a product that’s running a close second to Gmail?
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Q: How do you address the three key barriers to entry when it comes to Cloud Computing — Concerns over data security, service and support issues, and the ability to customize apps that are in the cloud?
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Q: What was the rationale behind the partnership with Salesforce.com?
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Q: What is the revenue model for your applications besides Gmail?
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Q: How many people are using Google Apps?
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Q: Why use Google App Engine over Amazon Web Services?
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Q: Are larger acquisitions part of a strategy for Google Apps?
Girouard talks about last year’s Postini acquisition.
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Q: Why is Google Apps still not quite there as far as core functionality is concerned?
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Q: What are the stakes that are at risk in moving to this model? Where will the battle be fought?
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Q: What does Google make of Microsoft’s claims that Software as a Service isn’t a viable solution and that only software plus services will work?
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This is an interesting interview that covers a fair amount of ground. I appreciate Dave Girouard’s assertion that it is still the early days for App Engine and cloud computing platforms in general. In particular, he explains the fact that there are two different audiences for cloud-based services. The first are actual end users (businesses and individuals who use the applications (e.g. http://www.salesforce.com) and second the developers who are building out applications on cloud computing platforms.
Clearly, the massive adoption is taking place in SaaS services right now. Furthermore, it is more likely that PaaS services will take off before there is widespread cloud computing platform adoption, as part of the value to moving to the Web is that someone else has built the application for you and allowed you to take advantage of related applications in an ecosystem. We recently published a blog post on this subject with the purpose of simplifying the discussion via images and cutting through the confusion.
You can read it here: “ASPs are dead, long live the Cloud” https://community.paglo.com/blog_topic/index/110-the-asp-is-dead-long-live-the-cloud
Brian de Haaff
http://www.Paglo.com
The search engine for IT
In our high-tech day and age, it never ceases to amaze me how bad we are at audio. Everywhere from the garbled “Now serving 23″ at the local In-N-Out, to the recordings on this page, to the quality of my cell calls. Whatever happened to “hear a pin drop”? Why can’t we ever get audio right?
boring to listen! Transcription would have better, faster and clearer :(
Yep, I second (or third) the comments on audio quality. This is pretty much unlistenable and should be made into a transcript asap. And the idea of chopping it up into chunks like this just makes it worse!
It is interesting to compare his vision with the one recently shared by Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce) here : http://www.webcloudworld.com/analysis/salesforces-ceo-platform-as-a-service-web-30/
Webcloudworld
http://www.webcloudworld.com
On-demand Business
Good content. Dave’s point that the cloud will be additive for the forseeable future is dead on.
I appreciated the experiment with this audio format. Needs some work, but nice to mix it up.
cloud computing is a farce. the internet is the internet no matter how you access it or which apps you use to navigate. i got a 2 new buzz words id like to share. rain computing. bubble computing,
The question about “Why is Google Apps still not quite there as far as core functionality is concerned?” is really interesting and Dave makes an interesting point. With SaaS apps it’s not necessarily about replicating traditional desktop apps feature for feature. One of the real opportunities within the space, especially for the smaller guys (e.g. not google) is to conceive and create new types of services, especially for business users, that directly address specific, unique needs of a well defined customer segment. I expect we will see a lot more innovation in these types of products and services over the next 12-18 months.
Alex Glassey
projjex.com
Help, I can’t get the audio to work at all. Anywhere else I can listen?
Audio not working on firefox. Too bad for a site like crunchgear. Leave these errors to amateur web designers…
hrm – works fine for us. OS?
Hi, it’s not working for me either, it stays “buffering”. I have Firefox 3.0.1 and Windows XP Pro.
Considering I had to go to IE, the article was still interesting (the audio format is a nice way to mix it up, although for now I’d stay with text). According to Rishi Chandra – Product Manager for Google Ent. – three thousand new businesses a day are signing up – most of them from the small business area. Big corporations are having a hard time letting go of their information to third-parties, so it’ll take a while for them to get on board with Cloud Computing and App as a service.
I read this on my iPhone. Very interesting questions, just wish I knew what the answers were. ” If they do not fit, you must transcribe”.
Added direct MP3 links for those of you having trouble — thanks for the heads up.
I think I read a post recently on TC about the obsoletion of voicemail. Yet, I’m wasting my time here on poor quality audio snippets that I cannot visually scan for interest or relevance, or even see at a glance the relative lengths of each response. Why not also include a dual-tone keypad?
Shouldn’t the presentation format have a compelling relationship to the nature of the information provided? Was there something noteworthy here in DG’s tone of voice?
Dear Walt,
Get over yourself.
Signed,
Everyone
Uh, how about the hearing impaired?
Please think of the chil…umm…deaf people.
Of course it’s less work to copy the audio on a website than transcribe it, but that leaves some visitors out of all the fun.
Br, “iTroll” :-)
Re: Why aren’t the apps quite there yet.
He’s right that they are improving, but we use them internally and they are too buggy for end users doing serious work. For example, simply converting to PDF (a native function in the word processor and spreadsheet, at least), often changes the formatting; it’s not wysiwyg, and you often have to make the original look wrong so that the PDF looks right. So you are stuck with a trial and error process: Convert, look for errors, tweak original, convert again, etc. Not ready for the big time yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
Google is in a position to seriously encourage the adoption of cloud computing. They need to get SMS working on Grand Central and combine it with GMail so they can offer 1 bucket for voicemails, emails, SMS messages, and Google Talk messages.
Then integrate Android with all these services! The possibilities are endless … Hak the Planet