Google Looks to Campuses for ‘Cloud’ Converts
With Schools Like Notre Dame in Its Camp, Opens Another Front in Battle Against Microsoft — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google's got a not-so-secret weapon in its bid to convert the world to applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's campus push did not start today. Back in August 2007, coverage of Gmail driving Google Apps adoption at colleges showed students pulling the suite onto campuses themselves, with Gmail fueling a wider student frenzy around Google services. What has changed is that Google is now recruiting institutions directly — Notre Dame stands as a named convert — rather than waiting for bottom-up student demand.
That institutional play sits inside a broader cloud build-out: in October 2007, Google joined I.B.M. in 'cloud computing' research, giving the company an academic beachhead for infrastructure as well as apps. The AdAge framing makes the target explicit — every university that moves mail, docs and talk off Microsoft's stack removes a future cohort of Office loyalists.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's Exchange-and-Office lock-in at universities comes under direct pressure wherever schools like Notre Dame migrate student email and collaboration to free hosted Gmail, Docs and Talk.
- Google gains reference customers for selling the same conversion to other institutions, turning each campus win into a sales asset against Redmond.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft must split attention and budget across multiple fronts at once — the article notes it is aggressively marketing Bing while reportedly in talks with Yahoo over a search-ad partnership — leaving fewer resources to defend the education channel.
- Campus IT buyers gain leverage: with a credible free alternative on the table, universities can demand more from both vendors on pricing and hosting terms.
Third-order effects
- If graduates arrive in the workforce already fluent in web-based Docs and Gmail, enterprise default choices tilt toward hosted applications — a shift analysts have already flagged as risky, warning that Chrome OS will move more data online and exacerbate phishing and hacking attempts.
- The pattern points toward productivity software being decided at the point of education rather than the point of purchase, making universities a durable strategic battleground between Google and Microsoft.
The trend: Productivity-software adoption is shifting to a land-grab fought first on university campuses, where free hosted applications displace desktop-suite loyalty before careers begin.