Google Biz Search; Apple Takes on Office; Other News
* Google is upgrading the search tool it sells to businesses. The new search appliance, which Google announced today, will let people search for information across all the data sources in a company at the same time, and display the search results on the same screen.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Search Appliance upgrade caps a stretch in which Google kept pushing past the consumer web: a June 2007 post on its enterprise blog raised the question of whether Google sells hardware at all, and July brought hosted site search aimed at small businesses. The appliance announced October 10 answers both threads — it is hardware, and it is not just for small firms, querying every data source inside a company at once and rendering the results on a single screen. It lands alongside a comScore estimate that the world runs 1.4 million searches per minute, with Google handling the bulk of them.
The roundup's second thread is competitive: Apple is taking on Microsoft Office in productivity software, and Google patented a mobile datacenter built into a standard shipping container — a design that follows Sun's earlier BlackBox modular concept while ignoring it by name. One year after completing the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition, the service has become virtually synonymous with online video sharing, a reminder of how fast a Google purchase can reset a category.
First-order effects
- Companies deploying the upgraded appliance get one-screen federated search across all their internal data sources, making Google a direct vendor of on-premises enterprise hardware rather than only a hosted-services provider.
- Apple's move against Office puts Microsoft's productivity franchise under direct attack in the same roundup in which Google pushes deeper into enterprise information access.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft must defend Office and its enterprise-software turf at once, while incumbent enterprise-search vendors confront a rival whose consumer-scale indexing arrives packaged as a plug-in box.
- Sun's BlackBox gains a well-funded imitator in containerized datacenters, pushing modular, shippable server infrastructure toward a standard product category.
Third-order effects
- If search becomes the universal screen over corporate data, control of enterprise information access shifts from database and document-management vendors toward whoever owns the query layer — the position Google already holds on the public web.
- Container-based datacenters point toward computing capacity becoming a standardized commodity, decoupling where services physically run from who operates the facility.
The trend: Google is porting its consumer web-search dominance — the bulk of 1.4 million searches a minute — into the enterprise through appliances, hosted services, and acquisitions.