Google “Atmosphere” event

I was invited to Google’s “Atmosphere” event which focused on cloud computing technologies. Naturally, I used my Android phone to navigate to the location, which worked pretty much flawlessly, though with traffic, partially related to bad weather, I was almost an hour late for the kickoff.

I hadn’t been to the Google campus before. It is a nice place. I didn’t find it over-the-top gorgeous, but I do love the proximity of it to San Francisco, while it is settled in the tall trees of Mountain View. My wife divides people into “mountain” people and “ocean” people. Google employees don’t have to choose.
Here are the three things that I took away from this event:

1) Google is serious about Gmail/Google Docs in the enterprise.  They acknowledge that most organizations are most interested in Gmail, but sense that once they get their foot in the door, tools like Docs and Sites, particularly as the continue to improve them, will compete with Office.  They can’t do that feature-by-feature, but what we heard from some of their guests — CIOs who had introduced Gmail + Docs into their operations — is that for the average user, the ability to create and edit basic documents and spreadsheets and share them and collaborate with their co-workers on them, that simplicity and speed are more important than all of the fancy features.  There will be exceptions: by all means give MS Office to your lawyers and bean counters, but your functional staff who actually keep the lights on, they are better served by Google Docs.

2) Google remains committed to Chrome OS.  They spent more time talking about it than Android, much to my surprise.  Although they handed out Nexus One’s to attendees, not netbooks with Chrome.  ;)

3) Even Salesforce.com, a company that I thought really gets it, can show themselves to be lame.  I was really interested to hear from Marc Benioff of Salesforce.  I was pretty impressed with them in talking to some of their managers at a government technology event last year.  What we got, rather than the cogent elucidation of web strategy and direction, of how organizations can leverage platforms like force.com to solve their development needs, was a product demo. Version X.X of Salesforce.com!  Coming soon!  For your sales people!  Yay!  Just because they sell a product designed for salesmen doesn’t mean they should act like salesmen.

Generally, this was a solid event. The lunch was first class. There were some issues with refreshments (surely Google understands the importance of keeping coffee available), and a shortage of bathrooms. Guest wifi was good. Seating was at a premium. Having arrived late, I stood through the whole event (except lunch), which is kind of unreasonable. I had RSVPed, you would hope that they could match the number of seats to the number of RSVP’ed attendees.

But, those issues notwithstanding, the event filled the niche that I wanted: it helped me understand the practicality of Gmail/Google Apps in the Enterprise, and gave me a feel for just where all of this is going. If the event is held again next year, I hope to attend.