Let the Wars Begin

As fast as the news of the bid from Microsoft for Yahoo, so did the news that Yahoo! officially rejected the officer yesterday.

In this letter from Jerry Yang to his employees, he claims that the Yahoo! bid was unfair, and didn’t value what Yahoo! really was to the internet world. Here’s a part of the letter:

We believe Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! including our highly recognizable global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms, future growth prospects, our ability to generate free cash flow and our earnings potential as well as substantial unconsolidated investments (like alibaba and yahoo! Japan).

You deserve the credit for the tremendously valuable business we have built. all of us in management, as well as the members of the board, deeply appreciate and respect what you have done and continue to do in order to maintain and enhance yahoo!'s leadership position in the online world.

However, with all this said in his letter, there is word that there could be more layoffs in the future. In this article at the New York Times, Microsoft didn’t appreciate Yahoo!’s rejection of their bid and called it “unfortunate.” They want this deal, and are making indications that they’re not willing to stop until they have Yahoo! as their own. Sources also report that Microsoft would like to keep it friendly, and stay on good terms with Yahoo. In today’s New York Times, they state that stocks closed 2% higher yesterday at Yahoo because of the belief that Microsoft will increase the bid. The other thing speculated about the bid is that Microsoft will put an end date and have the offer expire.

I think the easiest way to take in this situation is to look at it from both sides. I’ll start with Yahoo. It’s understandable that Jerry Yang doesn’t want to sell his business. They are currently the leaders in many things on the internet, such as music, gaming, and personalized pages. They were the search engine to use a decade ago. However, they’ve fallen behind in the one thing they started out doing: the internet search. They can’t compete with Google in the search world. They’re also loosing money and laying off employees left and right.
Microsoft is clearly threatened by the surge of Google’s dominance in the Enterprise 2.0 world and their overall dominance of the internet market. Microsoft isn’t used to loosing when it comes to deals and world dominance on software. They buy Yahoo! and they have a whole new staff with knowledge that can help them attack Google and give them an official competitor.

However, Yahoo! does have other options. It’s come back into the news that they’ve resurrected talks to merge with AOL. I see no advantages into this. Although it’s probably not going to happen because its one last attempt to keep business going, two struggling companies in a desperate last minute merger has failure written all over it. Google has also offered to help out Yahoo! In this article, Yahoo would start running AdSense on its pages, but this would show that Yahoo! is defeated, because in a sense it’s working for its one true competitor. In a sense, Google will be the one winning everything here, they’ve gotten a signed letter of defeat from their relatively only major competitor. And they don’t have to worry about the biggest software vendor in the world starting to compete anytime soon in the majority of the realms they do work in.

I personally think Yahoo! did well by rejecting the first offer. They know Microsoft is serious about their bid. So, I believe that when Microsoft comes back with a higher bid price, Yahoo! should take it. Their business is suffering, they’ve lost dominance. I think giving in to Google is a bad idea and would kill all dignity this once powerful search engine has left. So, Yahoo!, let another big name company come in, buy and begin to watch what happens when the collaboration starts to take off for Microsoft and Yahoo!.

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Google: Team Collaboration Within Its Grasp

Where does Google go after having the dominant market share in search and its hold on Enterprise collaboration growing by the day? The latest article from ZDNet came through my reader today and it highlights Google’s newest release of Google Apps Team Edition. Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, sums up how it works:

“In previous versions of Google Apps, Standard and Premier, the IT department had to get involved in verifying domains and centrally managing users. With the Team Edition a project group can use Google Docs on a project or the Calendar, and individuals on a team can sign up just using their email address.”

Projects in business enterprise environments are handled by teams, so any application that can ease collaboration between users without having to burden IT departments constantly are valuable. Now by simply entering their email addresses users are instantly able to share documents, calendar events, and form connections with other users.

Over the next couple of months we will see many users doubt the security of data sharing on Google’s portal, since most corporations out there are still using Office, but over time this trend will change. Sheth has mentioned that over 2,000 businesses sign up for Google Apps daily combined for a total of over 500,000 companies activated to date ranging from small, medium, and large organizations.

Google has found a way to reduce IT involvement in project management, but will Microsoft be releasing a similar application soon? We have an exciting couple of months ahead of us…

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http://enterprise-3.blogspot.com/

Social Searching: Google’s New Goal

Aside from Google’s latest advancements to help Yahoo! stay out of the grasp of Microsoft, they are also looking into providing a social search engine. The details of this quest are at ReadWrite Web.

In a recent interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Products & User Experience, she details how Google is looking to make your social networks influence the way your searches on the web are helped out by what your “friends” are doing on the web. As always, they are looking to protect the privacy of their users, because this is always one of the main concerns of the users. But there are four main ways Google is looking to do this: Labeling, users like you, social network integration, and socially influenced page rank.

Labeling would consist of other labeling web pages, like tags, and then they would be stored in their profiles. When the words were searched, tags would be provided by what your contacts have been searching.

With the Users like you function, Google would display what others searched for.

The Social Network Integration function would show you what your friends had been searching for in one day. Third party Social Networks such as Facebook and MySpace would eventually be brought into the picture, but for now this would just be Google’s social network.

Finally the social influenced page rank would be considered. This is set up believing that you would much more prefer to visit pages your friends visit. The more authority (or friends you have visiting the site) a site has, the more likely you are to see it in your search.

Google sees this as the future. Why not incorporate what your personal profile says about you with the results you get in your search engine? I personally don’t agree with this. I don’t want to see pages because of what my friends searched for. I want to see naturally generated searches with results on exactly what I’m looking for. I want the influence of the actual webpage and its content to tell me why it’s at the top of the webpage, not because I had three friends visit the website in one day. I think Google is overstepping privacy boundaries here. I think this is the job of web pages like Del.icio.us, not Google. What do you feel?
We're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Enterprise 2.0, add it to your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch:http://enterprise-3.blogspot.com/

Microsoft sets out to take over Yahoo!

News out today tells us that Microsoft made a $44.6 billion bid to take over Yahoo. The Enterprise 2.0 world has been wondering where Microsoft has been in this revolution, and now Microsoft has finally come to the party. In this blog, we’ve written several times about Microsoft’s lack of effort to match Google (Taking the lead in enterprise search, Future Product Releases for Google Apps, Whatcha Gonna do when Google Comes for You?) and their increasing interest in Office like software to help the revolution of collaboration online.

Now we see what Microsoft has been waiting on: the ideal time to buy Yahoo! This week in the New York Times, an article discussed Yahoo and its tough final quarter in 2007, and they are expected to lay off at least 1,000 people. It’s not hard to see why this is happening. At the end of 2007, Google had a 68.1% search engine market share, and Yahoo had 17% of the search engine market share. They were #2 on the list.

From an Enterprise 2.0 perspective, we automatically wonder what this merger means for the Google/Microsoft rivalry? Google has been trying to take the Internet market for the software they’ve been developing specifically for Internet collaboration in Google Docs. They’re one up on collaborative work essential to E2.0. Now Microsoft, with a few modifications to their software, can unleash a landslide on this market. We all know that people like to use what they are familiar with. When it comes to word processing, it’s defiantly Microsoft Word. If Microsoft can collaborate with Yahoo, and bring this technology to the web, it will take off.

From a commercial search standpoint, Yahoo now has a huge sponsor that is not willing to let its ship sink. Microsoft will take the proper actions to change what needs to be changed and update the Yahoo! Platform to something the people will use. They will be able to give consumers a choice again when it comes to Google.

We're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Enterprise 2.0, add it to your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch:http://enterprise-3.blogspot.com/

Next in Search Engines: Human-powered?

In an article today posted at CNet, they discuss the new search engine Wikia. This just launched search engine is completely open. It is the public who will determine what information is found and they also have many other ways to contribute to the search.

This search engine combines three of the main new tools on the Internet: human ranking of pages, a mini wiki and social networking.

To launch the site, spiders will crawl the web to bring up initial pages. But after that, the humans that take over. People will individually rank the sites they come across. After the pages are ranked by humans, the highest rated page will appear at the top on the search page. At the top of the page there will be a wiki about the search subject. The public will maintain this. As for the social networking, you can network with those who have left comments and edited the wiki. In addition to all of this, this site is a complete open source. Users can also tweak the code of the website.

Most interesting is that since the pages are rated by people, SEO will not be a factor in this search engine. I believe that the ability for people to rank the pages is far more valuable than anything we’ve seen before. If we set this in the environment of a corporation, the power of the knowledge that can be generated is huge. It is a chance for collaboration to shine; the most informational web pages can rise to the top. This concept might not take off at first, but I see an advantage to having human generated web pages. Would you use a search engine like this?

Enterprise 2.0: As said by one of the innovators

We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about Google. Most of the time, it’s about Google. Now, we get to talk with Google. Erick Schmidt sat down with the New York Times and discussed the topic of how technology in the workplace is changing so fast and how companies are evolving to make it work for them. In this article, he discusses these five downfalls of having instant information:

1) No falsehood can last.
2) People expect an immediate answer.
3) You can measure everything.
4) Managers will need a new way to listen to the information and uncover the gems.
5) Managers have to obtain everyone else’s good information, and avoid sinking in the vast sea of words

This may be difficult now, but as the next generation moves up, they have always worked with technology. How will the help with the adaption of these tools?

Google: An Enterprise Wiki?

Could the enterprise wiki Google Knol be viewed as a threat to Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers? According to the latest article on ZdNet the answer is no. Even though Google Knol is a service that aggregates knowledge from individuals, there is a big distinction between this service and Wikipedia. Google Knol will only highlight authors, or experts on a certain subject matter, whereas Wikipedia is a community effort.

But will this knowledge management application catch on in the Enterprise? Knowledge Management software is nothing new in the Enterprise, but what is inhibiting its success, since collecting information is so critical in businesses. Some say that employees do not want share knowledge because it might make them seem “less valuable.” In order to make this work, companies must reward their employees when they share information.

Finally an easy system to share knowledge within the enterprise has emerged. Google Knol provides a way to store key information that make the business more efficient. Do you think the enterprise world will catch on? I certainly hope so…

Alfresco: It Keeps On Getting Better

We quickly mentioned Alfresco’s new platform that would satisfy a company’s need for enterprise content management in a previous post, but aside from its social networking capabilities it will also provide rich mashups and widgetry into the Enterprise. This latest blog goes into detail on how Alfresco has stepped ahead of the game by integrating its ECM software with other Web 2.0 tools like Facebook, Flex, Skype, RSS Readers, and iGoogle just to name a few.

A couple of interesting features I particularly liked was Google Gadgets, which they will use for ECM. This will allow businesses to edit and manage data all within an iGoogle homepage. Their new mashup architecture, provided by Flex, will allow internet applications to be created on top of Alfresco. This will definitely give SharePoint a run for its money.

Everyone at this point should know by now that collaboration and communication is vital in maintaining an effective workplace. What else does Alfresco have in store for us in terms of Enterprise 2.0 technology? Alfresco is living proof that businesses should not fear Web 2.0 tools, but that they should fully embrace integration with their software. After all, look at all the good it has done for Alfresco…

Next for Google: Accounting?

In a recent post at ReadWrite Web, they believe that the next breakthrough application from Google will be the next an online accounting application.

What are some of the advantages they list for Google having an accounting system? Since it would be online, the possibilities are endless. ReadWrite Web believes they are: collaboration, retention of records, and accessibility. The drawbacks would be simplification and cost.

So why would Google take this approach for their next application? They have a knack for simplification as we saw with Gmail for email. This accounting system, due to simplicities among other things, could be of most benefit for those who own small businesses and have little training.

They already have several applications that would be able to play a key role in accounting: Google Scan, Google Docs, and Google CheckOut. Do you believe this is the next step for Google? Would you be worried if Google had access to your small business’ financial information?

Productivity: The Next Generation

In this recent article at Ziff Davis IT Link, it discusses the current Generation Y entering the workforce. Along with many of the other worries that are plaguing this generation, it contemplates the productivity and how best to capture their potential.

Davis is quick to show that this may be one of the first generations that can multitask successfully when it comes to digital media, often doing quite a few things at once. So how does a company take this asset and translate it into a successful business? Not to mention the fact that the generation entering the work force is nowhere near as large as the generation retiring. Enterprise software is the key to making up this huge difference as well. But who will make collaborative software that can capture the information and the talent?

That is still yet to be seen, but odds are it’s probably Google. They’ve shown the fact that they can create easy to manage enterprise software that is easy to both use and understand. Will other software giants step up to the plate? Microsoft has a lot to be worried about, especially if they don’t understand the current generations work process.

Software’s Year in Review

What would December be without “Year in Review”? ReadWriteWeb recently published their year in review chronicling what major software companies have done in the year of 2007. Here is a brief summary of what the players in the enterprise software industry are doing. For a more in depth view, read the article.

The biggest change of the year according to them was Google Apps. And the biggest disappointment was the lack of reaction from Microsoft. They’ve not done anything to show that they are reacting to the major movements in Enterprise 2.0.

Now a summary of what everyone’s been doing this year! Google acquired several platforms that they will use to redesign Google Docs. The only flaw that ReadWriteWeb sees is that they had no presentation software, but it was fixed when Google introduced a platform in September. Another attempt that surprised the market was when they teamed up with Gem Capitol to further push their software in corporations. Microsoft promptly released a 10-point list that listed reasons not to use Google Docs. Zimbra also released a statement attacking them. To further Google’s innovation in the Enterprise 2.0 category, there have been rumors of the past few months that they would release a corporate wiki application, but nothing has come out yet.

Now onto Microsoft! As stated earlier, they have done nothing huge publically this year when it comes to their applications and making them Web 2.0 friendly. In October, they did announced Office Live Workspace and Office Live was renamed to Office Live: Small Business. They also partnered with Atlassian and Newsgroup to make Sharepoint more Web 2.0 friendly.

Zimbra was purchased by Yahoo! For $350 million in September.

Zoho filled their year with steady updates to improve their Web 2.0 capabilities.

ThinkFree announced in August that they hosted one million documents and had over 335,000 users.

The company that is gaining the most traction is Dark Horse. They are an online IM club that announced a platform that has potential for web office applications.

Finally, as always, we look foreword to next year. ReadWrite sees Google Apps maturing into a more functional site that will be enterprise oriented. There is lots of high potential for next year to include lots of partnerships and acquisitions for the smaller companies that are expanding in the Enterprise/Web 2.0 world. However, the most interesting thing everybody should look out for is how Microsoft to the new online document capabilities of the internet.

Future Product Releases for Google Apps

I stumbled across this blog this afternoon written by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, and it spotlights cutting-edge upcoming plans at Google. Portal giant Google seems to a pioneering the movement to innovate Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. First off, Google is planning to launch Google Sites, which will be based collaboration tools featured on Jotspot, to allow businesses to create extranets, project management systems, as well as intranets.

Another announcement that I find particularly interesting is the expectation that Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs will soon work offline via Google Gears. This prediction has been heavily awaited, and I’m personally delighted to hear that it is currently in the works. Editing docs, presentations, and spreadsheets offline will soon be made possible, even if the document is being edited by another user on the online version. Changes will simply be made based on chronological order.

This is definitely a starting point for Google in the long road of constant updates in Enterprise 2.0 applications. Google is leading in collaboration efforts for now, but it will be interesting to see if other search engine giants like Yahoo and MSN will begin to mimic Google’s model.

Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0…….Inbox 2.0?

In the New York Times, Saul Hansell’s latest blog gave insight as to where Google and Yahoo are trying to improve their email systems. It is quite the hot topic, because TechCruch is discussing the topic as well. The goal of the two companies is to turn your inbox into your main dashboard for the internet. As with all the other rising trends, the goal of every company is to develop the next new thing in social networking software.

The main question that pops into my head after reading this article is why is Microsoft not jumping at the chance to improve Outlook? There’s no denying how pervasive it is in the workplace. There are so many critical business tools already encompassed within it, rather than focus on a separate Enterprise 2.0 platform, why not update the key elements that are becoming so important in the business world and expand further with Web 2.0 technologies? The program currently hosts email, schedules, tasks, notes, etc. It pushes communications and instantly connects a message you send to a topic and recipient (s). And all of this can happen in thirty seconds whether the recipient is in London or in the next cubicle.

Email today is one of the main backbones of business, perhaps supplanting of faxes and phone calls as they dwindle. Email has been critical to the growth of connectivity from the earliest days of the Internet. It’s remarkable that it’s not a cornerstone at the beginning of the Enterprise 2.0 revolution. Even with the rise of Instant Messaging within the workface, many companies still do not take advantage of this tool.

So now the ball is in Microsoft’s court. Outlook is in the perfect position to evolve into Inbox 2.0 at the forefront of Enterprise 2.0. The question is, will they choose to take Outlook to the next level? With Google clearly interested in the enterprise marketing could the day come that another platform could come to take Microsoft’s share of the business email world.

Watcha Gonna Do, Watcha Gonna Do When Google Comes For You?

First thing this morning, I received my daily update from eWeek, and it had a great interview with Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google’s Enterprise Division. The interview covers quite a bit, from Google’s recent IMAP for Gmail announcement, its perspective on application delivery (SaaS), its product development efforts separate from the consumer side, its foray in mobile applications, and interoperability. Yeah pretty much everything and the kitchen sink.

I want to focus on one question during the interview, at one point Matt is asked directly, there's some perception that the technologies you're using in Google Enterprise are hand-me-downs from the consumer side. So, there is innovation going on in Google's enterprise business? Matt proceeds to discuss their recent acquisition:

On the acquisition front, we recently acquired Postini, and that was purely an enterprise piece. Postini's security services are not necessarily that germane to the average consumer. What we quickly did was looked across the board and said, What are the really unique and interesting things that Postini has to offer [so] that, when we put the Google technology and the Postini technology together, you really get a one-plus-one equals three capability?
Postini's capabilities include legal compliance, archiving and data retention. The integration of the Postini capabilities on top of Gmail and Google Apps for businesses was one of the primary motivations of that acquisition. The idea was being able to provide all of those facilities to a customer still in a software-as-a-service model, where you didn't have to maintain your own servers for the purpose of legal discovery and backup. There are very real policy issues that we believe we have good answers to.

Clearly Google is serious about enterprise, though when it launched its Google Apps, this wasn’t a surprise. But what has always stuck out in my head is the development process for them. On the consumer side we’ve all read story after story about how they look internally for those new and unique apps that can be incorporated or spun-off as a new business line. They’re also acquisition hungry, eagerly seeking the next major innovation that they can bring into their enterprise. But while acquisitions can lead to great products for their enterprise business, what’s happening with natural development based on client feedback.

I’ve worked with some of the big vendors out there, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft and so forth and so on. All have built a strong consulting business that is focused on understanding the needs of their clients. In some instances this is backed by great internal development teams, and where they don’t have one, they find the right development partners. But their core strength has always been their ability to look under the hood of a business, study it from the inside out and help it to determine what applications it truly needs. Now that’s not to say this is always the fastest of processes, with lead times that can even stretch for years.

I can remember when Windows 2000 Server launched. Microsoft was everywhere, meetings upon meetings with IT teams across the country, helping them to understand how it worked, how to work with it, and its value to the organization. This was critical, this was absolutely necessary to help IT leaders to work with their business leaders and push to make the necessary infrastructure changes and incorporate Windows 2000.

But at the same time that’s almost where I would want to see a Google step in and change the game, bringing that amazing development talent to quickly turn around the apps that corporate clients are looking for, and create a simpler but secure deliver infrastructure that would lead to faster implementations. But they seem to be missing that external facing outreach to develop relationships directly with corporations
It’s my lowly opinion that while Google clearly has Microsoft in its target, it’s still a long way off from unseating it. Those strong relationships with enterprises are still a major advantage.

So the question becomes, can Google develop that expertise to work directly with enterprises in order to truly understand their needs, or will Microsoft begin to shift its development processes to more quickly respond the way Google does while utilizing its corporate relationships to shape the next generation of enterprise applications? Well, its easy to play pundit, but I certainly don't have the answer, but its a question I think will become more pronounced as Google takes bolder steps with enterprise applications, and everyone else responds accordingly.

The Word is Out on Enterprise 2.0

I came across a great posting on Read/WriteWeb blog on Big Vendors Scrap Enterprise 2.0 Supremacy, it’s an analysis on a Forrester report, The Big Vendors Converge On Enterprise Web 2.0, recently released. In this blog posting, it looks at the report and highlights specific details, who the major vendors are, the usual suspect abound, as well as highlight one company as missing, Google. I thought that was interesting point, my own opinion that while Google has made inroads in the business app front, I think there’s a great deal of time before we see a specific strategy that would directly compete with the current leaders.

One point it touches on briefly, but what mentioned directly in a comment left on the blog, is what’s happening outside of these large vendors. Read/Write Web suggests that the large businesses are more likely to purchases smaller developers with emerging technologies as a compliment to their overall platform:

However Forrester points out what many of us have been saying for a while: that the big vendors will "acquire best-of-breed vendors to augment, extend, and cover gaps in their own enterprise Web 2.0 portfolios."

Which isn’t surprising, considering the time and effort to develop critical applications, it can be far more profitable to build on top of a core suite of business apps then attempt to develop a stand-alone solution and compete with some of the largest businesses in the world. Of course considering the success of Google, one has to wonder what impact it may one day have.