With Schmidt out as CEO, Google can stop copying Microsoft | VentureBeat

Excerpt from a timely Google reality check (via seattlepi.com)

In the end, there is really no point of copying Microsoft on its own turf; as Schmidt has now found out three times, it is a lost cause. Google’s enterprise business — Google Apps and the like — have scored some wins, but are far from achieving Microsoft’s scale.

No wonder why: Imagine you are a typical business running Microsoft Outlook, Office, Exchange, SharePoint, .Net, and such. Google comes in and says, “We can rip some of this stuff out, it will be very painful to migrate your data, and you have to retrain all of your users.” And Microsoft comes in and says “we will migrate all of your servers to our cloud over the weekend, you guys can come back on Monday and everything will look exactly the same, except now it’s hosted and you can fire your IT department.” Which way do you think most businesses are going to go? It’s a nice business. It’s just not the future. Why bother competing for it?

With Schmidt out as CEO, Google can stop copying Microsoft | VentureBeat