Google was ten years old yesterday. Over that short period of time they’ve come a long way towards “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and userful”. Every second people all over the world are relying on Google to help them find information about some topic.
Google has grown to a company that is 20 thousand plus employees and has the largest American company market capitalization for any company that is not part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
While the Google Search engine and page rank algorithm has powered their growth and success, they’ve been less successful trying to diversify into other areas. Particularly in the enterprise. The Google Search Appliance was launched in February 2002 to provide enterprise-internal search capabilities. In 2007 Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition. Gmail also is available as an enterprise outsourced email option for companies. But so far enterprises have been wary and few businesses have signed onto any of Google’s enterprise offerings.
But that may be beginning to change, albeit slowly. The newest version of the Google search appliance is being more favorably received. Gmail is becoming a mature product, despite having been labeled ‘beta’ for more than four years. And Google Apps is being positioned as an on-line alternative to Microsoft Office. A lot of progress, but then still a long ways to go before Google will replace Microsoft in the enterprise.
