Can Google Rewrite the Relationship with Corporate IT?
There are two ways to penetrate the corporate firewalls of the world.
The established method is to reach out to IT managers and make it worth their while to adopt your software. See the history of Microsoft, providing a safe corporate purchasing path for a generation of chief technology officers.
The other way is to create a groundswell of support for your tools, and make it easy for users to use them behind the firewall.
Flickr and Picassa: photo management and sharing in new ways that allow a huge amount of flexibility for those who need to manage images.
Acrobat, Flash, MP3: became worldwide formats with and without active corporate IT support.
Photoshop: ignored widespread piracy outside its core market of design shops and big companies; used ubiquity to wipe out its competition.
Now there’s news that Google is making a bid to wedge its team collaboration tools into the business world by enabling users to find others using Google Apps (Calendar, Documents, Google Talk) Team Edition products on the corporate LAN, and set up their own groups for sharing files and information.
This feels like an infringement on the traditional IT shop’s turf in such an in-your-face way that it may spur LAN managers to new heights of service denial.
Is this a smart strategy, or are they waving a red flag in front of all the CTOs out there? What do you think?
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POSTED IN: Audiences, Customers, Marketing, Persuasion, Strategic Thinking
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