Ok, I was with Google when it came out with the Google Pack. Sure, it was a fantastic disappointment of a shareware garbage bag dumped out on your doorstep when you were expecting an operating system. Then came Google Talk, winning Google an award for the “Halfass Attempt of the Century” in the area of computer software.

And we were still sitting around talking about Google, enjoying the freebie services, liking the competition it was giving to Microsoft to keep them on their toes, looking forward to the next big thing. Many of us naysayers claimed Google would never do something so pointless again.

Wrong again. Gphone got announced today! Except, its not a phone. Oh, and there is no SDK. Umm, no real screenshots or demo. All in all, nothing.

So here is the $700/share question…

Google appears to have become a company that is in business of selling dreams and possibilities to shareholders, not really delivering technology solutions, especially not past the beta stage at which over half of its projects sit in limbo of perpetual lack of business sense and plan.

There are two Googles. There is the Google the advertiser and Google the dreamer. Google advertiser is making $$$ off the adsense. Google the dreamer is building frameworks, crappy Web 2.0 applications, laying down fiber under the Pacific, flying to the moon, buying landing rights to the NASA airfields and is the neverending warchest for those who have been disaffected by Microsoft but could not adjust to the alternative lifestyle that comes with a Mac..

In the long long ago, Jim Cramer said that he was paying the press release to earnings ratio – this seems to be back, much as it was back during the dotcom boom. We seem to be completely ignorant of anyone who is truly presenting a solution to a problem that is here and now and are simply betting these vapor companies will exist solely on their advertising to a consumer that will be doing what? Writing Web 2.0 apps and buying iPhones?

Maybe in San Francisco… Maybe three years ago… But not today, what will Google do to prove that its more than a one trick pony?

Although this was to be expected eventually, Google seems to have jumped off their Application plank a little too prematurely in announcing that they are going after the enterprise market which what is arguably the feature set of an entry level web hosting provider. Mary Jo Foley offers an excellent “top 10 questions” any enterprise customer should ask before switching to Google Applications and they are literally shaming Google in a way that is just spectacular:

“1.      Google touts having enterprise level customers but how many “USERS” of their applications truly exist within the enterprise?

“2.      Google has a history of releasing incomplete products, calling them beta software, and issuing updates on a “known only to Google” schedule – this flies in the face of what enterprises want and need in their technology partners – what is Google doing that indicates they are in lock step with customer needs?

“3.      Google touts the low cost of their apps –not only price but the absence of need for hardware, storage or maintenance for Google Apps.  BUT if GAPE is indeed a complement to MSFT Office, the costs actually become greater for a company as they now have two IT systems to run and manage and maintain.  Doesn’t this result in increased complexity and increased costs?

“4.      Google’s primary focus is on ad funded search.  Their enterprise focus and now apps exist on the very fringe and in combination with other fringe services only account for 1% of the company’s revenue.  What happens if Google executes poorly? Do they shut down given it will them in a minimal and short term way?  Should customers trust that this won’t happen?

“5.      Google’s apps only work if an enterprise has no power users, employees are always online, enterprises haven’t built custom Office apps – doesn’t this equal a very small % of global information workers today? –On a feature comparison basis, it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a huge lead.

“6.      Google apps don’t have essential document creation features like support for headers, footers, tables of content, footnotes, etc. Additionally, while customers can collaborate on basic docs without the above noted features, to collaborate on detailed docs, a company must implement a two part process – work together on the basic doc, save it to Word or Excel and then send via email for final edits.  Yes they have a $50 price tag, but with the inefficiencies created by just this one cycle, how much do GAPE really cost – and can you afford the fidelity loss?

“7.      Enterprise companies have to constantly think about government regulations and standards – while Google can store a lot of data for enterprises on Google servers, there is no easy to use, automated way for enterprises to regularly delete data, issue a legal hold for specific docs or bring copies into the corp.  What happens if a company needs to respond to government regulations bodies?  Google touts 99.9% uptime for their apps but what few people realize that promise is for Gmail only.  Equally alarming is the definition Google has for “downtime” – ten consecutive minutes of downtime.  What happens if throughout the day Google is down 7 minutes each hour?  What does 7 minutes each hour for a full work day that cost an enterprise?

“8.      In the world of business, it is always on and always connected.  As such, having access to technical support 24/7 is essential.  If a company deploys Google Apps and there is a technical issue at 8pm PST, Sorry.  Google’s tech support is open M-F 1AM-6PM PST – are these the new hours of global business? And if a customer’s “designated administrator” is not available (a requirement) does business just stop?

“9.      Google says that enterprise customers use only 10% of the features in today’s productivity applications which implies that EVERYONE needs the SAME 10% of the feature when in fact it is very clear that in each company there are specific roles people play that demands access to specific information – how does Google’s generic strategy address role specific needs?

“10.     With Google apps in perpetual beta and Google controlling when and if they rollout specific features and functionality,  customers have minimal if any control over the timing of product rollouts and features – how do 1) I know how to strategically plan and train and 2) get the features and functionality I have specifically requested?  How much money does not knowing cost?

“I invite you to speak with customers, partners and analysts who can validate Office’s business model.”

I must admit that I’ve been on the receiving end of Microsoft muscle at times, but my hat is off to whoever put the top ten questions above, they are head and shoulders above the tired FUD Microsoft uses against free and open source software and are just dead on attacks on the way businesses rely on software.

Will “GAPE” be another “Google Pack” or will it be a “Google Search”; Judging by whats on sale Microsoft and Microsoft Partners that relish on the complexity of these systems to provide value-add it’s good times ahead if this is the type of competition Google was thinking about bringing. A webmail & pop3 account. Yah, right.

Ok, I’ll say it. Google Reader’s recent update sucks. Big time.

Google Reader team decided to get cute and give me more real restate on my screen – at an expense of the nagivation and efficiency. Instead of having a bar at the left side of the screen so I can quickly scroll through my blogs and categories, Google decided to remove it completely and make it a slide-in <div>.

Congratulations. So now instead of being able to click on different feeds and quicky catch up I have to click once on My Subscriptions link and look at the shrunken list of my blogs. Then I have to scroll up and down the list, add a click or two, and then click again on the feed I want to read – just to have my feed subscription list disappear.

And nobody at Google figured to say.. “Hey, this might piss off a lot of users, how about we add 2 lines of Javascript code for a “dock” function? What good is revert to previous version when it reverts to the same crap?

But Google shouldn’t be too down on itself, I am still using Google to find myself a new RSS reader.

One of the search features I would really appreciate would be to search for the results available in the database on a particular date. For example, what if you searched for “Bush nucular evidence” in 2001 vs. 2007, you’d get some wildly different result sets.

My particular problem, and the reason I am writing this blog post at 5 am, is that for the past few hours I have been trying to locate a mailing list response from the author of dovecot from the long, long ago. I cannot figure out how to do static maildir mappings without involving uid/gid in auth_userdb database.

Google does have a search that limits how old of a result you wish to see (show only pages that were first seen over the last 6 months) but nothing to say show only results available prior to date m/d/y. Oh well, there is always hope for live.com search, lol.

I think its a fair question to ponder: is Google still around?

Last year around this time Google was really in the eye of many techies wishful for a free, on-demand collaborative suite that was readilly available. Google was rolling, first with mail then calendar but a year has passed since and um.. what have you been up to Google? Acquisitions have brought word processing and spreadsheets which raised about as much excitement and adoption as Microsot Zule. Nearly everything is still by invite only, no clear roadmap or direction or really much going.

The clock is ticking.Google sure killed MSN.com & Live.com search efforts but just how far will it be able to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft when that Office 2007 marketing budget hits the street?

This article certainly points to an interesting change of pace in Redmond when it comes to the ongoing battle for Web 2.0 dominance. While Microsoft is certainly turning the ship to open fire on Google and the myriad of the new .com startups, Microsoft still remains at disadvantage because it has a lot more to lose than to gain at least initially. This new development of making Works available online for free is certainly interesting, considering that the cost of $50 (to Microsoft, “retail”) could be easilly made up by anyone actually using the application online:

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday it may offer a free, advertising-supported version of its basic word processing and spreadsheet software, in an apparent bid to fend off a nascent challenge from Google Inc. in the business software market.

Microsoft, which dominates the market for desktop computer software through its Windows and Office franchises, has long resisted offering its software online.

But it faces a growing pack of Web-based competitors — led by Google — that is offering similar technology for free with a business model that makes money off advertising.

The world’s largest software maker is now mulling how it can move Microsoft Works, a basic suite of business software that often comes preloaded on inexpensive consumer PCs, onto the Web as part of its growing stable of free online services.

Microsoft continues to roll out new online services under the Windows Live brand and it started testing Office Live, a software for small businesses to create e-mail accounts, Web sites and collaborate on projects.

Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft Information Worker Business Strategy, said the company will consider many options to woo entry-level users.

“We’re also thinking about how we might take advantage of new business models like advertising and other payment models, as well as new forms of distribution,” said Yates.

Revenue from software licenses for Office and the Windows operating system accounts for a bulk of Microsoft revenues.

The challenge for Microsoft will be to make sure a free or, possibly, a subscription-supported version of Works won’t hurt sales of its dominant Office software, which accounted for a quarter of the company’s $44 billion in sales last year.

Microsoft expects its new version of Office, due out in early 2007, to spur another round of demand. Office includes Outlook e-mail, PowerPoint presentation software, Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Word.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft sells the latest version of Works, which includes a calendar, word processor, spreadsheets, Web Browser and e-mail, for $50.

Last month, Google said it created a free software platform to run a set of business software programs including e-mail, scheduling and communications. A paid, premium version will be available later this year with an ad-free option.

At the time, Google also said its online spreadsheet and word processing software were candidates for bundling into its business software platform.

Google acquired word processing Web site Writely.com in March and began testing Google Spreadsheets, which allows users to create, store and share spreadsheets on the Internet, in June.

So here is the Web 2.0 scale as I like to see it. A year ago right about this time Microsoft was almost down for the count. It just got smacked by the steel chair and got the elbow drop from the top rope across the ring. Google released Gmail and speculation of Google Office was mounting. Microsoft, dazed and confused, was spending live.com $$$ on creating online/sharing integration for its upcoming Office 2007 suite knowing full well that most corporate (“big money”) users have privacy policies restricting the sharing and uploading of files outside of corporate firewalls.

So here we are a year later and boy does time make a difference. Google has released one uninteresting application after another unexciting bundle and is slowly but surely losing both trust and fan girl image that it once had. They are the Back Street Boys now, whether they like that or not. Fan girls are over on myspace, on Youtube, blogging, vlogging… and Google has to put a finishing move on Microsoft, which as in all wrestling, appears to be Hulking up through some miraculous burst of energy.

Make no mistake, Microsoft is still very bloody and the greasy hair is looking pretty bad. It has to convince already frugal corporate gatekeepers that the productivity from its new OS and Office suite will displace the additional costs of retraining and retooling literally every non-ITPRO worker (you know the kind, that have printing instructions glued to the side of the monitor) and change the way they have worked and viewed their desktops for close to a decade.

The funny thing? Even though Microsoft is no stronger a year later, Google is by comparison weaker and has virtually everyone else after them, at least in the web 2.0 world. And that, after all, is what we’re lead to believe is the future… The funny thing is that the one leading that notion is Google themselves.

It’s been a while since I talked about G vs. M, but little has changed since then. Google is still whipping that llama.

If you’re a Microsoft Small Business Specialist I hope you remember the IT Basic questions from the Sales & Marketing assessment. If you’re truly one of us you also know that most small business owners, regardless of size, tend to be IT Basic, if not to an extent even IT ignorant. 

If that turns out to be true, there are bad times ahead for these guys.

Google is launching a (beta) of Google Spreadsheets, a web-driven ajax spreadsheet program that at least for my needs is superior to Microsoft Excel. Yes, superior. Look at some of these modern features that are available directly from a web site: access control, instant sharing (enter an email and send out an invitation), realtime collaboration via IM. No application to install, no viewer.. just the web browser. I don’t need to link data in 3 books, I don’t get easily impressed by shiny objects and I have not built my entire business and accounting system on top of Excel – but what I do often is edit the sheets with multiple people, work from systems that do not have Excel installed, create backups and save my work at every turn. For me, this is perfect and its enough.

More importantly, as I use this I will invite others to look at the Spreadsheets and edit them in a browser instead of piling on attachments and thus starts a viral elimination of Microsoft Excel.

Now I usually caution against trying out beta software for consumers but considering that this runs out of a web browser it just might be worth a try. Honestly, I’d pay for Google Spreadsheets over Microsoft Excel, just based on the few screen shots that I’ve seen. Although ads don’t bother me much I really don’t click on them often and I’d rather pay and get all the screen real estate I can. Really, it is that good… except… Google Talk is just awful which means I’ll be sticking to Outlook until Google admits that their chat is weak and figures out a way to totally rip off MSN Messenger.

Now will an established small business jump at this? Highly, highly unlikely. One thing you start to appreciate about small business IT ignorant cases is that they will run their business out of an Excel spreadsheet. That spreadsheet eventually becomes a full blown application and a CRM and a toaster and a babysitter when the child grows up enough to be able to do basic data entry. Forget about “switching” to Google Spreadsheets for most established small businesses. However, if you ask 9/10 people they will admit that the behavior I just described is detrimental to their business and that there must be a better way. So to all the doomsday predictions in links above, I don’t think Microsoft has much to worry about here. For the new business, IT basic and everyone not living in a spreadsheet… there seems to be less and less of a reason to buy Office 12 with each passing day. Don’t worry about Steve or Eric, they’ll still sell millions of copies of Office 12, in the short term they got nothing to worry about.

In the long term, this is pretty bad for Microsoft. Where is a live.com equivalent of Google Spreadsheets? “Our goal is to make our customers more productive with bloatware” is the likely quote from Microsoft PR because, lets face it, do you think they would really sacrifice their cash cow to win a little fight with Google? Of course not. But in the long term, that same stance of “our customers need features, our customers need integration” will make live.com part of their initiative largely irrelevant. What is more likely here? Microsoft kills its cow and succumbs to Google’s killer online portfolio… or Google rips off MSN Messenger and pushes forward with Gmail, Gcalendar, Gspreadsheet, Gpowerpoint and Goutlook? I’d bet on Google. Which, in essence, is a bet against me and my business.

Who are you betting on today?

Free tool allows you to syncronize your Windows Mobile phone with free and sharing-friendly Google Calendar.

Every now and then I get approached by someone that needs a shared calendar or a good calendar for their use but they don’t need Exchange. Newlyweds need help coordinating their joint activities. Pregnancy or new baby brings up a scheduling nightmare. Party planning. As Windows mobile becomes a commonplace so does the reliance on shared calendars but the only thing Windows Mobile will sync against is Microsoft Exchange. Enter Google Calendar.

Google Calendar, which launched just a few short weeks ago, has become a de facto standard for free calendars online. It is friendly, dynamic, fast… and supports sharing… AND now can be synced to your Windows Mobile device using this free utility: Companionlink for Google Calendar.

It’s free, syncs using Outlook (which is also free with every Windows Mobile phone you buy) and you can sync and share to your hearts content without bringing in Exchange/SBS. Now all thats left is the the disappointment that comes with knowing how boring you are and how little life you have.

Guys over at msmobiles really did a good job selling this and also have a story about G-Spot XP, a free tool to take better screenshots of your SmartPhone.

Update: Whoa, what a bait and switch. Apparently earlier today it was free, now its magically only a 14 day trial. What a bait and switch. I'm sorry I sent you there under the wrong premise (unintentionally) and I would nuke the links to it along with the post except this may be worth it to someone, somewhere. As for the publisher, shame on you.

Google Desktop 4 is out and in one hit takes out 50% of the eyecandy that Microsoft is promising with Vista when/ever it comes out. Gadgets (similar to side dock, Yahoo Gadgets, Widgets, Mac OS X stuff) are new and allow you to detach parts of your Google Desktop sidebar and smack them on your desktop. Pretty nifty but fairly useless and annoying for anyone over 13. It is somewhat interesting to see how Google is taking Microsofts hints and teasers and turning them into actual, free, downloadable (albeit beta) quality software. 

Google Desktop is supposed to leave the beta stage and go live today. I initially got GDS for search purposes but what made me stay is the near infinite number of widgets that are developed by others – most even share the source code. Certainly something for Microsoft to take note of and excite developers for their search platform at launch. It's not all about "finding" it, its more about organizing and making it available. My GDS includes news, scratchpad, todo, quickview, weather, search and RSS from places I still browse to. So go get it. Make sure you do not enable search across workstations or Google will copy your files to their servers. Big no no!