Report on ITA General Session - Google Enterprise

This is the fifth in a series of postings about my thoughts from sessions that I attended at the Information Technology Alliance’s Fall Collaborative (<-I love that word) held in Palm Springs.

This was one of the most anticipated sessions of the conference and it did not disappoint. Michael Lock is the director of channel at Google and give the association an update on Google’s thinking:

Google makes the assumption of abundance of all things, for example, bandwidth and processing power. Apple did this when they created the graphical user interface. You must assume abundance to be innovative.

Some choice quotes were:

• “We will look for a fewer number of quality partners.”
• “You can move off of google.com anytime at zero switching cost. We have to keep you interested.”
• “Operating systems should be (errr, will be) free!”
• “Google is in the 1st inning of the first game of a 162 game season.”
• “Google has over one million users on the Premier version of Google apps at $50 a pop that’s a cool $50 million.”
• “Google has introduced 109 new features in gmail this year alone. How were we able to do this – We only have one version.”

When asked about Google Wave, Lock replied that he is unclear of what will happen it. I love that. That is how great innovation is done – lots of ideas. Some of them will work and some won’t.

In a moment of pure irony the presentation Lock was using, created in Google’s presentation software, of course, was interrupted by a Microsoft Windows dialogue box with an error message indicating that ActiveX (a Microsoft product) had crashed.