Google’s Scalability Day – Platformonomics

Excerpt from a Charles Fitzgerald Google-in-the-enterprise reality check

"Google has many intangibles to overcome if it wants to be a serious enterprise player. They still seem to believe every potential customer wants to be like Google. The vast majority of companies aren’t Google, can’t ever be Google and don’t even want to be Google. SnapChat and Spotify are not exactly emblematic enterprises. Culturally, Google starts with even less experience with enterprise customers than Microsoft had at the time of Scalability Day and arguably an even more engineering-driven culture with even less appreciation for the cognitive foibles of the median human. Unlike a Microsoft that had building an enterprise business as its top priority, Google the advertising company and Alphabet the technology conglomerate have many other (and frankly way cooler) priorities. It isn’t clear that a mundane investment in say 5,000 enterprise sales and support people will get the nod over the moonshot de jour (Drones! Robots! Life Extension! Board Game Championships! Squirrel! Space Elevators!)."

Google’s Scalability Day – Platformonomics