Drive allows people to store photos, documents and videos on Google’s servers so that they could be accessible from any Web-connected device and allows them to easily share the files with others, these people said. If a person wants to email a video shot from a smartphone, for instance, he can upload it to the Web through the Drive mobile app and email people a link to the video rather than a bulky file.

WSJ’s Drew Dowell has details of Google’s planned cloud storage service, intended to compete with Dropbox. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The Google service, which is expected to launch in the coming weeks or months, will be free for most consumers and businesses. Google will charge a fee to those who want to store a large amount of files, the people familiar with the matter said.

After the announcement, I tweeted a simple enough question, asking the community if this was an indication that DropBox (and other similar filesharing services) will be disrupted by Google. The tweet garnered a bunch of responses, some of which I include below;

Would have to offer more storage for less money and be easier to use. Not an easy task.

I think you over estimate Google’s power.

Depends on Googles policies – if they read/server ads against your stored data may not go over well

i will take the bet. dropbox is going to fuck up other people’s shit, not the other way around.

Dropbox integration ease and ecosystem play is REALLY powerful..

Since so much heat was generated, I though I’d spell out my thoughts, in particular as they relate to DropBox. I’ve posted before about what I see as DropBox’s corporate immaturity, in the face of a real competitor, and one that has a massive existing userbase through its own Application suite, DropBox will have to be smart to maintain momentum.

Some respondents likened GDrive to Google+, the over-hyped and seriously on-the-backfoot social network that Google recently introduced. One commenter took the perspective that since DropBox is primarily used for sharing of files and folders, that the Google+ analogy is the best one to use to predict success. I don’t really buy that, Google apps already offers a social overlay, inasmuch as it needs to in order to enable file and folder sharing – Google Apps has been doing so for years now and is equally easy to use as DropBox in my opinion.

Alex Williams was even more forceful, saying that;

Dropbox is a gem w/ incredible depth. a new kind of technolgy that , Ben, you are very much underestimating.

Alex is an awesome guy, and much of the time I’m happy to defer to his analysis, but I’ve been using DropBox (and competitors SugarSync, Syncplicity, Google Docs etc) for years and I really fail to see this depth that Alex intuits, as for DropBox being a new kind of technology, I don’t see that. It’s an effective front end to cloud storage that has done a great job of making a friendly UI. I don’t see anything really revolutionary in the technology there.

But my bottom line sits outside of the technology. DropBox, over a number of years, has shown itself to be poor at being a disciplined and effective business. They’ve grown amazingly well because of the viral nature of their product and largely because they had first move advantage. Google has the ability to be cheaper, more ubiquitous and has an existing client base that should readily convert to GDrive.

That’s my analysis – watch this space I guess.

One way that Google has maintained simplicity while not missing the features that larger organizations need is by the use of third party tools offering specific functionality. Perhaps best known of these is Cloud Sherpas who have had great success with a bunch of administration functionality for Google Apps in their SherpaTools product. Next up to he plate is BetterCloud who are today launching DomainWatch, a security offering for Google Apps users. Based in New York, BetterCloud is run by David Politis, who previously ran the SMB group for Cloud Sherpas.

The idea of DomainWatch is to give IT the ability to monitor, control and secure end-user access specifically to Google Docs, Sites and Calendars. So what does DmainWatch offer? Specific components that this $8/user/year toolkit offers include;

• Policy Editor and Compliance Analytics: Policy Editor allows admins to specify what’s permitted or not permitted to be shared outside of their domain. DomainWatch monitors domains per admin created policies and flags non-compliant sharing as a violation

• Dashboard: The dashboard provides a single view of how admins share Docs, Sites and Calendars with people both outside and inside of their domain

• Asset Search, Filter, Discover: All domain assets can be searched and filtered along nine dimensions, giving admins a comprehensive view into Docs, Sites and Calendars

• Domain Trends: An automated analysis of all Docs, Sites and Calendars in a domain gives users a complete asset inventory. Multiple domain management allows admins to report and filter by the entire domain or by any sub-domain

• Security Detective: Search for users or groups with whom documents are shared.  For example, admins can discover which Docs, Sites and Calendars are shared with contractors, so admins may remove access at the completion of a project

• Take Immediate Action: Remove a specific sharing mode from a Google Site, remove access to Calendars from an external user, or change ownership of a Docs collection.

There is always tensions between partners building features onto a core product, and what the core product itself will introduce. Much of what Google Apps has offered via third party add ons in the past has since been rolled into the core offering and this is something that BetterCloud needs to be wary of. That said, their proposition is a sound one, and as long as they keep innovating there is a big opportunity for them.

• New social analytics software that integrates wikis, blogs, activity streams, email, calendaring, and flags relevant data for action
• The new IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is a cloud-based productivity suite allowing users to co-edit documents in real-time and is a clear response to Google Docs and Microsoft’s 365 Live products (in beta, due some time this year)
• New software that integrates social networking capabilities with enterprise content management as a response to both SharePoint and new platforms from box.net and Huddle
• Domino – a new messaging and collaboration software offering that aims to steal some of the thunder off Yammer and Salesforce Chatter

It’s a lot of news and a bunch of product announcements, only some of which are actually generally available yet. This is however IBM and the availability and quality of the offerings are somewhat secondary to the fact that IBM sales staff will now have an answer to the ongoing questions from enterprise customers about IBM’s response to compelling offerings from Yammer, Box, Google and a myriad of others.

In a statement more akin to the words of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Alistair Rennie, general manager of Social Business at IBM said that;

There is boundless opportunity for social business to transform how we connect people and processes, and increase the speed and flexibility of business. A successful social business can break down barriers to collaboration and put social networking in the context of everyday work, from the device or delivery vehicle of your choice, to improve productivity and speed decision-making

Music to enterprise ears, so long as the products actually deliver on the promise. And so long as those organizations haven’t already looked elsewhere to fulfill their requirements in these areas.

I’m particularly interested to hear more about IBM Docs, a “social document platform” and IBM’s strong move against both Office and Google docs. Hoping that integration across office productivity, content management and storage, provides added value for prospective customers, IBM has created the offering so that IBM Docs authors will be able to store and share documents in IBM’s own SmartCloud Engage, and gain visibility over the documents through IBM’s content management offerings.

It’s early days for IBM, and they enter a market that, while still full of opportunity, needs to see strong differentiation between different vendors. IBM will hope that it’s massive momentum and brand recognition will provide that differentiation – time will tell.

But when suggesting this “give it a go” approach to people, I’m often met by exclamations of concerns and comments that ‘there’s no way small businesses will ever just dive in and have a go with unproven technology”. Well a case study I read recently seems to challenge the veracity around that claim.

Jason O’Neill runs a small construction company, ONC. He seems to be your typical builder whose attitude to technology is summed up best by his comments;

I’m not a technical person, I’m a builder. My knowledge of sending an attachment by email was that’s hard.

One couldn’t hope for a better example of someone unlikely to adopt cutting edge technology. Or so I’d have thought. Only in O’Neill’s case it didn’t work that way. Exposed to Google Apps at a networking event, O’Neill decided to experiment using Google Docs, Calendar and Forms.

He began quite simply introducing a single address book for all his staff that has contacts color coded depending on the type of contractor or customer they are. O’Neill didn’t stop there though; he set up a shared Google spreadsheet to track construction jobs and even started using a simple Google form to collect specific information about different contractors.

Now obviously O’Neill isn’t doing anything amazingly technical. His isn’t a case study that shows Cloud Computing as ground-breaking in technical terms. But what it does show, and perhaps more importantly than technological paradigm shift, is a transformation in the way organizations work, and a fundamental change in how they interact with technology.

I’ve long said that Cloud Computing is a trend that, while exciting from a technological perspective, is even more exciting for the fact that it has the ability to finally deliver on the promise of democratized IT. Cloud Computing finally delivers that vision where almost every person anywhere can access products or services that are of the same level previously only available to the largest organizations.

It means that Jason O’Neill, a small time building contractor, can have a presence, and can enjoy the sort of digital tools that his largest competitors can. And that’s truly exciting.

This series of posts are companion pieces to the CloudU series of educational material. We’d love you to join in some of our webinars or read the whitepapers the CloudU homepage is – here – and you can register to have updates sent to your inbox (in a non-spammy way of course!) there.

Well news today from Syncplicity in my view speaks to this fact and to a certain extent at least shows the direction they’re heading. The announcement today of an Android product that is targeted at adding both file access and sharing for mobile users is a step in the direction of a true collaboration platform rather than essentially a front-end for generic cloud storage (valuable as it may be). Key indicators that this is more than a simple mobile front end for the existing application comes from Syncplicity’s release which says, front and center that the application includes a;

newsfeed to see what file activity has been happening across all their computers and devices, including updates in files and folders shared among colleagues.

Which starts to move into the territory of workflow and collaboration management far more than simple backup and sync. Syncplicity, in another move that would appear to aim straight for enterprise users, is adding enterprise grade functionality including;

• The ability to remotely wipe downloaded data and credentials if a device is lost or stolen
• Cached files stored encrypted at rest with AES-256 encryption
• The enforcement of organizational controls, permissions and policies set by administrators

The company is still articulating its offering in more traditional terms. CMOP Jeff Schulz, formerly of Bill.com says that;

We are passionate about the future that cloud and mobile computing offer businesses and individuals and are laser-focused on making file access, sharing and backup easy and effortless for users while providing the security and control that businesses and power users expect

While that is the wording today – I strongly suspect that we’re going to see Syncplicity delve more and more into the features that true collaboration vendors like Box.net (and it’s arch on-premise rival SharePoint) offer.

The people who used to say his would point to Microsoft Office functionality, question how it would ever be replicated via SaaS and then laughingly point to a Zoho Docs or Google Docs and laugh under their breath.

And then something happened, Zoho delivered a SaaS spreadsheet tools with that holiest of grails, pivot tables (yeah, apparently they’re uber important to some folks). Google Docs got real-time collaborative editing and deeper and deeper functionality.

These people then moved on to richer apps, things like presentation software. “Never” they said “will tools like Keynote and PowerPoint be delivered from the cloud”. And then something happened, tools like Prezi and SlideRocket came about and, while they haven’t crushed PowerPoint, they both deliver great functionality to rival that of the incumbents, along with stuff that traditional apps simply can’t do (collaboration, analytics etc)

So the naysayers moved to the “heavy tools”. The sort of things that those I euphemistically call the “crayon and paintbrush crew” use. Those designers that spend their days in Photoshop and Pagemaker.

And then something else happened, Adobe announced, with a growing realization hat their future is in the cloud, an intention to introduce services in the cloud, services based upon (and sometimes even to replace) those traditional heavyweight tools like Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and others.

And the world changed. Again

And then we read case studies like this one, where cool products like Connect2Field (disclosure – I’m an advisor) enable Mom and Pop businesses to gain efficiencies and power their businesses to compete with the “big boys”.

And the world changed again.

The world is changing my friends. Not today and maybe not tomorrow. But slowly and inexorably the world we know it is changing, and the cloud is making it happen. And I, for one, welcome our new cloud-based overlords.

Last week I wrote about some issues that were raised at a recent CloudCamp I ran in Australia. Last week I looked at the contention (of some) that Software as a Service (SaaS) is no more than the Application Service Provider (ASP) approach of the nineties, albeit with a different name.

This week I want to look at a contention that some who were at the CloudCamp made about “functional completeness”. Some in the room contended that;

SaaS will never be functionally sufficient for real world use. No one will ever run their business on Google docs.

The upshot of their argument was that users need full functionality and that the ability to do that within the browser is little more than a pipe dream. It is for this reason that one of the attendees, GoPC foudner and CEO, Graeme Speak believes the approach his company takes – that of virtualizing full versions of desktop applications and providing them remotely via a virtual desktop – is optimal.

The 80/20 Rule. Again

In a previous CloudU report, we looked at the 80/20 rule of the Cloud, in that case in relation to Cloudonomics. When it comes to functional completeness, and how it relates to suitability for purpose, the 80/20 rule once more comes into play.

Look into any organization that is a user of desktop software (for ease of use let’s say Microsoft Word). How much of the incredibly complex functionality that word provides do users actually need? And how much of that core requirement is actually missing from SaaS alternatives like Google docs or Zoho. My contention is that for the vast majority of cases, SaaS alternatives more than provide the level of functionality that people actually need.

True there will always be power users who actually use the full range of functionality provided by desktop software, but I contend that for every one of those power users, there are a significant number of users who would be just as well served by a SaaS alternative, as by a full desktop package.

Add to the fact that SaaS delivered software brings advantages that desktop software can’t offer (accessibility anywhere, collaboration etc) and the equation tilts strongly in favor of online options.

Iteration Soon Catches Up To Lethargy

I’ve been using Google Docs for five years or so – in that time I’ve seen the offerings move from being seriously functionally limited, to serving the vast majority of my needs – be it for spread sheeting or document creation. I’ve seen regular updates to the applications with new functionality being rolled out at an amazing pace. In the same time, and not to belittle Microsoft Word, an application that has, after all, incredible momentum in the marketplace, I’ve seen Word stand still in terms of functionality, and start to look seriously flawed in terms of the ever increasing requirement for online access and collaboration.

Extrapolate this trend out over another five years and it’s not hard to imagine a time when the balance is flipped – when Google docs (for example) provides ALL the functionality that the vast majority of users need, and does so in a way that enables collaboration and anywhere access. At the same time I can imagine Word sitting where it does today – as a big (really, really BIG) application that is the metaphorical typewriter to today’s sleek laser printer. All the while not really offering what users want – to be able to work on documents where and when they want.

Someone once said to me that it’s not the big that eat the small, but rather the fast that eats the slow. The analogy works well in the software space, desktop software may be big and powerful, but SaaS moves fast – watch out!

We’re covering these areas of Cloud Computing on an ongoing basis at CloudU, an educational series aimed at increasing the knowledge and skill that SMBs have about the Cloud.

Firstly some context. I’ve used MS Office for, I guess, 15 years or so. I’ve also had a few years experience with OpenOffice. I’m a heavy Google docs user as well as having dabbled with Zoho docs and those archaic apps that came bundled with Macs last century – it’s fair to say I’ve run the office productivity gamut. I’m not a power used – I rarely get jiggy with pivot tables and the like – but I’m probably at a use level along with 90% of other users out there. Given that, I think I’m vaguely qualified to articulate an opinion.

And that opinion goes thusly: OpenOffice is just wrong.

Strong words, and destined to get the backs up of my FOSS friends so let me explain. I divide the office suite using world into two distinct groups. Firstly, and the smaller of the two groups, are the power users. They’re the folks who have tens of thousands of rows in their spreadsheets, dozens of worksheets and use high level functionalities – macros, pivot tables and the like. I’d suspect that perhaps 5% (maybe 10% at the outside) of users fall into this category. Second up, and making up the vast majority of users, re those who simply want a product that they can make half-pie decent looking docs in, deliver a presentation and use a spreadsheet.

So what are the tools that are most fit for purpose for these two groups? For the vast majority – an online suite is perfect. It meets their needs, allows for collaboration and, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t confront them with utter bloat. It’s about allowing users to do what they need to, in the easiest possible way. For most of these users, a “full featured” office suite is just too complex for their needs.

For the power users, and speaking about where functionality, the limitations of the browser, latency and practicality lie today, desktop applications will remain the best approach. Yes I know some will so that as heresy, but I see it more as a pragmatic approach to finding the best solution for the problem at hand.

And yes, before you ask, I do realize that Office is *kind of* online and that OpenOffice also has a *sort of* online offering. That doesn’t change my core contentions in this post. And now over to the ever-vehement FOSS folks to rebut…

As is often the case with these sorts of analyses, it’s what is left unsaid that is arguably more important than what is said.

Some things I’d like mentioned or assessed to make a comparison more meaningful;

• An analysis of the benefits to be gained from the cloud based nature of two of the offerings (ability to mine web data etc)
• The release cycle of cloud based vs Open Source software
• A comparison of all four offerings in relation to MS Office itself

The InfoWorld analysis looked at the main productivity (documents, spreadsheet and presentation) – it didn’t look at associated offerings from the same vendors (Zoho business, Google’s other offerings etc). As Raju pointed out in his post, if you look where the cloud based apps have come from in only a couple of years, it’s plain to see that their development velocity is far higher than the installed competitors – extrapolate that fact out for another few years and we’re sure to see cloud based apps streak ahead of the competitors – the one question that remains is what is Microsoft’s strategy around S+S for MS Office?

As I say it’s a fantastic initial offering – what would really add some secret sauce would be if Google allowed their own users to create (and save) their own templates – I’d love to have a letterhead template sitting in Google docs for instance. Watch this space…