The big news last week was Google's decision to discontinue Google Wave, its potentially-revolutionary UC service. I hate to say I told you so, especially because I didn't tell you so--but I did kinda-sorta accidentally point in that direction.
A couple weeks back I wrote a blog entitled, "Dog Food, Kool-Aid, Google and Apple," about a Web-based petition calling on Google to publicly release a softphone that it had been "dogfooding," that is, rolling out to internal users. After watching a video demonstrating a leaked version of the softphone, I concluded that this was a product that nobody needed, and that it couldn't matter less whether Google ever released it.
Google Wave may not have been in exactly the same situation--unlike the softphone, it did seem genuinely innovative and cool. But the bottom line was the same: It was a product that had no reason to exist, and it represented a foray into a market that Google didn't need to be in.
In case you missed them, we have a couple of really fantastic short analysis pieces on the Google Wave decision: One by Brian Riggs, who highlights Google’s lack of commitment to the enterprise market, and one by Dave Michels, who happens upon the reason for that lack of commitment, which is something I think we should bear in mind as we think about Google in the enterprise communications market going forward.
Dave cites a quote from Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO: "Remember we make the majority of our money on advertising;" Schmidt goes on to explain why releasing and supporting the Android OS makes business sense: The mobile Web is a source of ad revenue. The corollary would be that Google Wave didn't make business sense for Google because it couldn't generate ad revenue.
Most big technology companies at their peak have one--and really no more than one--core mission, and everything they do either supports that core mission or gets jettisoned (or the company goes under). Cisco is in the business of selling switches and routers, and everything else they do has to drive bandwidth usage. Microsoft, when it was at its peak, was all about the Windows operating system, and everything they did was about forcing people to use Windows.
Google is in the business of selling ads. They've been doing lots of other things as they try to figure out what will offer more outlets for them to sell ads. Maybe they see themselves as potentially in some other business in addition to online ad sales, but they've already got an incumbent's dilemma: They're a public company that depends on ads for their revenue stream and hence their stock price. As Eric Schmidt said in the interview Dave Michels quoted, Android is a great platform for furthering this mission--and, ironically, so is Android's chief competitor, the Apple iPhone. If Android didn’'t serve this purpose, its future would be a lot less secure, no matter how successful it was as a mobile OS.
So here's my prediction about what Google will do in the enterprise communications space: Whatever sells ads. Right now, that's synonymous with saying that Google will not be in the enterprise communications space, because free communications supported by advertising is not something enterprises are interested in deploying.
Will that change? It might. Probably not by the choice of enterprise managers, but if, somehow, Google comes up with a successor to Wave that becomes a hit with end users and they choose to use it in droves (think Skype), enterprise managers will be forced to deal with it; they'll have to come down somewhere in the continuum of accommodation/toleration/looking the other way. It would be a consumerization play, and we know that the enterprise immune system is defenseless against successful consumer technologies.
So when I say I don't expect to see Google as a significant challenger in enterprise communications in the near or even mid-term, what am I missing?
