Stan Beer
Sunday, 30 March 2008 14:45
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Google's earnings have slowed; it's stock is down 40% from its jumbo $747 high in November 2007. This is arguably the first true test of the mettle of the world's newest technology super giant. Is Eric Schmidt's vision of a world blanketed by cloud computing dominated by Google a ray of sunshine on Google's horizon or is search the only thing the company is good for?
Google has released a plethora of beta products
since it started and many of them are absolutely fantastic. But the
only thing the company has ever made serious money on is search ads.
Granted, search has so far proven to be a killer app for the Web.
However, there's no doubt that other types of Google products have gone
mainstream, such as Google Maps, Gmail and Google Calendar, while
others, such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets, are slowly catching on as
a nervous Microsoft watches from the wings.
Many of us now use Gmail and Google Calendar as our primary email and
calendaring applications (at least I and many of my colleagues do).
There are now so many ways to connect to the Internet that it makes
little sense to tie yourself down to a particiular computer because
your emails and calendar entries happen to be sitting on a particular
hard drive.
As a frequent business traveller, it's handy to be able to access my
email and calendar system from any computer connected to the net in the
world. Extend that to other office productivity and business
applications, add in a cloud telecommunications product and things
start to get interesting, not to mention cheaper, for a plethora of
users, many of which have been precluded from the conventional world of
desktop computing because of the high cost of hardware and software.
So why is Google currently in the box seat, while Microsoft and a host
of cloud computing wannabees remain in the equivalent of the nose bleed
section at the cloud computing game? CONTINUED
