The idea of a cloud drive or folder in the sky is obviously a good one. We’ve been waiting for how long for the fabled gDrive? As a Google Enterprise customer I am glad to know I can now upload any kind of file, up to 250MB, into my account. Very handy. But the use case on the Official Google Enterprise blog post announcing the news reads like, well, its like the cloud never happened.
Let’s say you’re about to make a very important presentation to a prospective client on the other side of the country. Before you depart on your business trip, you download all of your presentation materials and InDesign® hand-outs onto your trusty thumbdrive. Just in case, you also email the files to yourself.
But while you’re in the air, your colleagues back at the office are making last minute edits to the files and your copies are now out of date. Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.
Sound familiar? The good news is that things are about to become a whole lot easier.
What? No that really doesn’t sound familiar. RedMonk uses Google Docs so we don’t worry about this kind of thing. As my coworker James Stewart commented:
“Its like their own products never happened“.
Replacing the Thumb Drive? The cloud already did that.
“Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.” AINT GONNA HAPPEN. Road warriors have laptops. Its what they do. Failing that they have iPhones, or, dare I say it… Android Phones. Really, who leaves for a business trip carrying nothing but a USB stick?
I can only assume the Google Enterprise team is so tightly ensconced in the GooglePlex that they aren’t used to the workaday scenarios the rest of us are. The post certainly made me chuckle this morning.
Tools for automatic file migration and syncing between multiple folders and devices? Now *that* is a use case. See DropBox, Evernote, Mozy, SugarSync etc. I want Google to offer me the Synchronised Web, not a USB stick replacement.
Google is not a client.
monkchips says:
January 13, 2010 at 1:31 pm
James Governor’s Monkchips » Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t Get Out Much, do ya? http://bit.ly/63AMJS #google #android
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Travis says:
January 13, 2010 at 2:17 pm
To me and most other people reading your blog it is a bit comical. However, you have to remember that we are likely the top tier in terms of internet savy.
There are orders of magnitude more people to whom this message would still hit home.
sogrady says:
January 13, 2010 at 2:19 pm
the latest from @monkchips, “Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t Get Out Much, do ya?” is very amusing: http://bit.ly/63AMJS
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dberlind says:
January 13, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Good one @monkchips (Note to Google Enterprise, Don’t Get Out Much, Do Ya?) http://bit.ly/63AMJS Has anyone tried Nomadesk?
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James Governor says:
January 13, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Travis I don’t buy that. USB sticks were very useful, but they were never a laptop replacement!
I don’t think I am that different from your common or garden business traveller. dude i run *outlook* !!!
Glen says:
January 13, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I see Google’s scenario as old-school marketing. (1) you have a new offering. (2) you decide what it’s good for. (3) you invent a problem to which your offering is a great solution. (4) you try to tell everyone they have your problem.
Obviously, “store anything” is a good capability but the marketing team needs to work on #3 because people aren’t buying #4.
SteveL says:
January 13, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Maybe you are getting a glimpse of their infrastructure, how they work. Take the MS product suite, outlook never used to handle loss of WLAN because the redmond campus had good coverage. And because everyone is in the same place, time-zone awareness in meeting scheduling is a non-issue.
USB sticks are handy if you have linux laptops that don’t work reliably with external projectors. But putting presentations up online is easier in a world of ubiquitous connectivity.
dan mcweeney says:
January 13, 2010 at 2:51 pm
While, ancedotal – if you look on the google site for their top Management, there isn’t anyone that has a role of “product strategy” for their online properties. There are people that have it for Android and if you look at Android the apps are all pretty cohesive. Their online properties though is a totally different story.
You’d think for a company hell bent on engineering and web apis, they would use the apis and engineering knowledge already at the company.
utollwi says:
January 13, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t Get Out Much, do you? http://ow.ly/16ksrL
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James Governor says:
January 13, 2010 at 3:21 pm
@Glen- very nice take on 4 step product marketing! 😉
The “and your InDesign files” is the real giveaway….
@SteveL – really solid point about Microsoft. I always found that with Exchange/Outlook – it was clearly designed for a high spec network where protocol chattiness wasn’t really a big deal. But the Silicon Valley culture is very much about Campus Life. The architectures may be distributed but the people are not.
@dan_mcweeney anecdotes are good. But I believe Docs does have traditional product management. Interesting to note that Google Maps certainly did- they hired Carl Sjogreen, ex BEA, to lead that.
monkchips says:
January 13, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Silicon Valley culture is about the Campus. The architectures may be distributed but the people are not http://bit.ly/63AMJS
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CloudBlogs says:
January 13, 2010 at 4:13 pm
#Cloud #CloudComputing Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t Get Out Much, do ya? http://url4.eu/17Th4
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madge707 says:
January 13, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Good discussion around this post “The architectures may be distributed but the people are not http://bit.ly/63AMJS” (via @monkchips)
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Totera says:
January 13, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Great!» James Governor’s Monkchips: Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t Get Out Much, do ya? http://ow.ly/WaXZ
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jonerpnewsfeed says:
January 14, 2010 at 2:54 am
#news Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t Get Out Much, do ya? http://bit.ly/6HgutY (via @jonerp)
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DE says:
January 15, 2010 at 12:36 am
Even simpler Glen,
Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit
Oh wait, that’s Twitter.
MetiaAR says:
January 15, 2010 at 2:20 pm
RedMonk: Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t get out much, do ya?
http://digbig.com/5baxsd
This comment was originally posted on Twitter