Google's New OS Will Offer Remote Desktop Capabilities
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It has been noted here that the world's most widely used database is Microsoft Excel. This is because enterprise software is about top-down control of workflow and processes -- it's solidified corporate policy/politics! As a result, enterprise software sucks. In order to work around maladapted restrictions imposed by enterprise software, the most productive workers take their processes and automation into spreadsheets like Excel, where they can adapt quickly to changing conditions. Often, the most successful of these processes are then built into enterprise applications, to become the new status quo.
Google wants small and transitional medium sized businesses to outsource much of their IT to them and to run their spreadsheets on Google's apps. Google hopes that this will allow them to do with ad-hoc processes in spreadsheets what they did with web links: organize and unify a huge collection of disparate linkages to create value. When a company has all of its spreadsheets in Google apps, users will be able to link data in disparate spreadsheets. This network of links will be subject to analysis. New business processes will be absorbed from the ad-hoc spreadsheets into the enterprise more quickly and efficiently. This will have tremendous value to companies, especially small and medium sized ones, some of which will grow into giant conglomerates. If this works, Google stands to dwarf the achievements of Microsoft.
EDIT: This remote desktop stuff is just a selling point in support of larger goals.
Well good, because that's not my theory. I never said Excel wasn't good on its own merits. What I am saying is that Excel is used for ad-hoc process and automation.
The phenomenon I actually described happens all the time on trading floors in the energy industry. Whatever trading system is in use gets in the way of something new. The processes to support the something new are run largely off of spreadsheets. If the something new is a big hit, higher-ups start a project to enable the new processes on the enterprise software where they can be better controlled.
My experience (mostly in smaller companies of <1000 people) has shown that people use Excel because of low barriers (easy to learn), quick results, empowerment, and ownership.
If Excel didn't have all of these attributes, it could never be used by non-programmers to support ad-hoc processes.
One of the challenges is whether the person/people who developed the spreadsheet version and the enterprise development team can successfully manage a transition to a formal enterprise project. Sometimes, the people who build these spreadsheets see the job as their domain, and see outsiders as treading on their turf, while the development team is not always sensitive to the ownership issues.
Most often, the organizations I've seen see this more as a problem of lack of control and wish they could stamp out spreadsheet use entirely.
Nobody in enterprise will take the Google office suite seriously unless there are some serious additions to performance and features.
Linking data from disparate spreadsheets sounds good in theory, until you find that trying to use any non-trivial dataset will break Google spreadsheets, your browser, or both.
I entirely agree. There's going to have to be a lot of heavy lifting to get them ready for what I described.
How is this different?
The advantage with this is to connect you probably simply visit chromeos.google.com (or something) and log-in. You don't have to worry about the IP address of the machine you're using or firewalls or anything like that.
For "normal" desktop apps (e.g. MS Office) - wouldn't providing access to these kinds of things undermine Google's strategy of doing things in the browser?
I guess they could provide a LogMeIn/GotoMyPC kind of product - but that is hardly revolutionary.