At Google’s May 2007 Annual Shareholder meeting CEO Eric Schmidt identified a new corporate tag line – “Search, Ads and Apps” reflecting a shift to go beyond search and advertising into online software applications.
In a recent Aug 2009 interview he answered the question – What is Google?
Google CEO - Eric Schmidt
“I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It’s a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search…I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know. And the first and the second are inter-related. The third is I think of us as a network of partners and infrastructure.”
#3 is what Google APPS is all about – independent partners (i.e. GAFYD.net) helping the world at large tap into Google’s infrastructure and multitude of services to provide all essential daily electronic processing (email, calendaring, document library etc). Schmidt later adds “…we’ve always taken the position of we want to do things that matter to a large number of people at scale.” This is the killer difference for Google.
Historically application software was built according to the size and wealth of the audience. Consumers and small companies got simple basic applications while large companies and enterprises got complex and sophisticated applications. This was far more a result of the “available infrastructure” than actual need – everyone “needed” quality sophisticated applications.
By leveraging the Internet and server farms to create cloud computing Google has assembled a way to provide “equal infrastructure” to everyone – from a one man company to enterprises of 100,000 people. This allows the same quality application to “scale” – meaning it can be used by both the smallest and largest of user audiences. When combined with the universal access enabled by the Internet Google can always “…do things that matter to a large number of people…”.
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