Just yesterday, I was talking to a colleague about Google's business strategy. As I mentioned on a previous post, Google's move into the phone and ISP markets illustrates it understands the importance of not being reliant on third parties to provide the "last mile" to the consumer. Instead, they need to make in-roads into the space to prevent being elbowed out by other players who want to use their muscle to exert anti-competitive behaviour on Google.
And Google should be afraid of such tendencies.
Contrary to Capitalist mythology, innovation does not trump all. In fact, if it is easier (i.e. more profitable) for the king of the mountain, so to say, to kick upstarts and start-ups off of the mountain, then they will do that rather than innovate. Take for example David Sarnoff of RCA. He worked to crush the FM radio technology - even though it was superior - to his AM radio technology because it would disrupt his business.
Coincidentally, the Globe and Mail reported that Google is making a push into the business arena:
"The tools include the ability to create separate personal and professional profiles on the same phone in an effort to reassure workers worried about their bosses snooping on their private lives. Even though the data is kept in separate silos, Google has created a way for work programs and personal apps such as Facebook to appear on the same home screen for convenience"
It seems that Google has adopted BlackBerry's "Balance" feature that enables it to separate personal and work related apps and data.
Google has a website dedicated to this initiative (for the announcement see here). The website also has an impressive list of partners who are working with Google on this. As evidenced by this video, this project had been officially unveiled last summer:
Given Google's eminence in Big Data and Cloud Computing, I am waiting to see how these features will be incorporated into future offerings that were focused on the enterprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment