I think the recent release of Google's Chrome browser has opened a lot of eyes to Google's ambitions to break into the enterprise software market... an ambition that has been questioned on grounds of both wisdom and probability.

A recent article from CIO Magazine introduces another point of skepticism even as it re-examines Google's motivations to enter the market. As does Zoho's Sridhar Zembu in one of the links above, Juan Carlos Perez points out that Google's income is primarily from consumer internet services currently, and with that being the case, they may not be so serious about the enterprise market as they continue to purport.

As with the Mr. Zembu's assertion, however, I feel compelled to point out that Google may have motives beyond simply next quarter's profit motive. As others have pointed out for some time now, internet search (where Google makes most of its money) is an extraordinarily ephemeral market. While most enterprise vendors have a significant degree of software lock-in among their customers after they win the initial adoption, Google has nothing on its bread and butter beyond their proclivity to type it into their address bar when they want to look for something... a proclivity based largely on the success of their search algorithm. But as founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would no doubt be first to admit, it's all too easy for some Stanford student to come up with a better algorithm in a garage somewhere, and change the shape of that market almost overnight. With the increasing ability of startups to rent large-scale server capacity raw and cheap, Google's massively parallel infrastructure holds no guaranty of position either. With their AppEngine offering, it's entirely possible they could be run out of the search business by some startup using their own capacity against them. The author of the CIO Magazine article, Perez, actually reinforces the point in another article, quoting industry analyst Rob Enderle as saying, "Google's fortunes could change dramatically overnight." (Perez has been on something of a 10-year anniversary Google blitz recently; he also has an article with Google's side of the story up now.)

But Google is often criticized for at least appearing to minimize its interest in the enterprise even as it purports to seek it. The culture there simply isn't amenable to the sort of support and feature-driven development that enterprises want and need, and they have not made any significant steps to alter it. I've leveled similar accusations against Apple in its presumed designs on enterprise penetration, so it seems as if I should be amenable to such arguments.

Perhaps I am. But Google, like Apple, may have found another way into the enterprise, one that CIOs have little control over, and one which may render its adoption more fait accompli than hard-fought revolution. The adoption of most Google applications can and does happen largely outside the IT department, perhaps often outside the CIO's sight. While this won't make the company any friends among IT executives so usurped, it may mean that they can bypass that battle entirely.

Is it working? Google claims their adoption rates for Apps are skyrocketing. While there isn't as much detail with those numbers as one might like, and while they do come from Google itself with its agenda behind them, it does paint a picture of much more rapid adoption in business than many would have predicted. There isn't any real reason that this should not happen; many of the reasons cited for the inevitable failure of Apps center around its lack of features and lack of focus on enterprise IT department requirements. But we've already addressed here why the latter argument holds little water, and the former is similarly encumbered by an outmoded, overly technical view of IT that is also slowly fading among progressive CIOs. Features do not, in and of themselves, define the suitability of a product; the utility of those features in addressing common business needs does. And it's long been recognized outside the IT department that full-featured office applications are generally wasted on the majority of users. The users already know this; now they are in a position to do something about it, with or without IT's assistance.

Chrome is simply the most recent example of this approach; what is easier for users to do than download a free browser? One which happens to be tailored to enhance the performance of Google's other online offerings and bundled with its Gears software for off-line use? Chrome shows that Google understands many of its deficiencies in the enterprise software market, and is willing to make big, if unconventional, moves to correct them. So I would say that Google's enterprise ambitions are alive and well, and the mixed signals that the company seems to be sending out don't necessarily indicate a lack of committment, but perhaps a strategy (calling it that may be too kind; it may as well be a lucky coincidence) that must of us simply aren't disposed to credit just yet.