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Zoho is NOT a platform!

This is indeed freaky. I started writing this post in the morning, then saw this new Dilbert gem this afternoon - while watching the Bears get badly beaten by the Chargers :-(. So I learned 2 things today - Web 2.0 has indeed become mainstream, and the Bears aren’t going back to the Super Bowl.

So I bumped into long-time industry analyst Amy Wohl at the Office 2.0 conference last week. I hadn’t met Amy since I attended a seminar she ran for IBM South Africa back in 1984! Anyway, we got talking about “platforms”, since it was a word that was being bandied about with great abandon at Office 2.0. Seems everyones product was a “platform” of some sort.

We agreed that this is plain silliness. In the end, there will only be 4-5 true platforms in the brave new world we are now entering. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, SAP, probably Oracle, maybe Ebay, maybe Facebook. Salesforce is trying to establish itself as a platform, but I doubt it will succeed on its own (it will probably be gobbled up by one of the other players).

In this new world, software companies will need to build their products on top of a platform to succeed, just like ISV’s are now building their applications on top of the Salesforce or Facebook platforms. This is necessary to provide the seamless experience users need. Not that users won’t be able to use applications on other platforms - it will just be more difficult and rarely worthwhile.

“Platform suites” are the new product suites. So you have Google Apps as a platform suite, much like the MS Office suite, but so much more. Stay tuned for more on this…

A brief critique of Burton Groups “Google Apps in the Enterprise”

Let me start by saying that the responsible position for author Guy Creese to take would have been much closer to LimitNone’s white paper entitled “Google and Microsoft: Living together in harmony”, because most organizations have a lot to gain by mixing the two environments. But that would not have garnered nearly the same amount of attention as pitting Microsoft against Google and taking every opportunity to point out why a Google solution could be a “career-limiting” move.

The real differences between Microsoft Office and Google Apps is best shown in this graphic. And this is what Mr. Creese fails to recognize - Google Apps is a very different beast than Microsoft Office and addresses a very different need. Comparing the two as though one was a replacement for the other is completely meaningless.

There are a couple of minor errors in the report:

• He states that “It is worth noting that developers cannot programmatically create a new spreadsheet.” We do this quite easily in gSHARE for Excel.
• He refers to “Google Works”, by which I assume he means “Google Gears“.

There are also some odd comments, like:

• Not having an offline capability may “marginalize employees who do not have a connection at home”. Which century are we in? My 85 year-old mother-in-law has an internet connection at home.
• It is “Difficult to Plan for Product Capabilities and Rollouts”. This is true if you roll out a new version every 4-5 years (think MS Office). But incremental changes to this type of software is hardly an issue. We are not talking mission-critical software here.

All in all, I think this could have been a very useful document for anyone considering Google Apps, if only the title (and gist) had been: “How Enterprise Architects can leverage Google Apps in the Enterprise and thereby boost their careers.”