Google claims more than 2 million businesses and 20 million people have switched to Google Apps, a movement the company is touting through its expanding "Gone Google" marketing program.
Google's official blog on Monday put in a plug for the ongoing flow of companies that have adopted its services, including not just Google Apps, but also the Postini spam filtering and Google's Enterprise Search Appliance.
In August, Google asked customers to tweet the benefits of using its online apps and services, and now the company has gathered together those tweets in its GoogleAtWork Twitter page.
Through its "Gone Google" marketing campaign, the company has been able to relate the stories of corporate customers who have switched to Google Apps and "no longer have to deal with the hassles of managing e-mail servers or rolling out software updates."
The "Gone Google" campaign has also included billboard advertising in high-traffic spots like airports and train stations. Pleased with the results, Google said it's expanding the campaign to other countries, including the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Singapore.
With a portfolio that includes Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar, Google Apps has been adopted by more large businesses in need of software that costs less and is easier to maintain. Converts to Google Apps include Motorola with 20,000 users, Genentech with 16,300 users, and Valeo with 30,000 users.
Google has also been more creative in nudging businesses toward its services. As one example, the company's Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in lets users keep Outlook but move away from Microsoft Exchange.
Even Google's response toward advertising has been evolving. In the past, the company has typically avoided promoting its own services, relying more on word of mouth to grow its search and ad businesses. But it's recently become less shy about tapping into the ad market, using TV, billboards, and other unique arenas to tout Google Apps and its Chrome browser.
Users of Google Docs, the online applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, now have a wide range of templates from which to choose.
Google on Thursday announced the templates, which were created by Google and a number of companies with experience in the business. They can be browsed and opened through a template gallery that currently has 294 to choose from.
Google Docs users now can use a wide range of templates.
(Credit: Google)Among the options: wedding planners, business cards, cover letters, screenplays with proper formatting, invoices, loan amortization schedulers, fantasy basketball standings predictor, wedding photo albums, and party invitations.
I personally was excited to see the Sudoku template, was initially disappointed that it looked broken, but then realized much of its interface, including a solution checker, is available through tabs at the bottom of the document. When can we get a Kakuro template?
Some templates, such as the group shared expense report, are explicitly designed to take advantage of the fact that Google Docs can be edited by multiple people, one of the natural advantages the technology has over PC-based editing.
Microsoft has long shipped many templates with its Office suite, and many companies and individuals offer their own online, but I see some interesting potential here for some good user-generated content. So far, though, I don't see any way for people to upload their own templates to the gallery.
Update 12:00 p.m. PDT: Google said user-generated templates will be an option later. "Eventually, we want to give everyone a way to submit templates so we can capture the broadest set of use cases and let the user-rated favorites bubble to the top. But we don't have a specific timeline to share at this time," the company said.
A large number of Google Docs users couldn't use their online word processor or presentations for about an hour Tuesday. But the glitch illustrates not just the troubles with cloud computing, but also the gradual progress in making the concept palatable.
Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else's computing infrastructure, and that can be scary.
What's gradually emerging, though, are guarantees and practical tools that likely will help ease the transition.
Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger version.)
Google, for example, offers a service level agreement (SLA) promising that Gmail, the online e-mail component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9 percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers if Gmail dips below that level.
And SLAs are coming to the rest of Google Apps.
"We don't have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it's something we're moving quickly toward," said Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Apps. Google wants "to get the same level of reliability for all of Apps," he said.
Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work down to the level of trying to build ubiquitous high-speed networks, and Yahoo has just formed a cloud computing group of its own. The trend has the potential to seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.
There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online applications such as Google's Apps, Yahoo's Zimbra for e-mail, Zoho for office and business software, Adobe Buzzword for word processing, and Salesforce.com for managing customer relations. Second are general-purpose foundations such as Amazon Web Services, Saleforce.com's Force.com, and Google App Engine on which customers can run their own applications.
Taking the plunge into the cloud
Service level agreements are the kind of contractual guarantees that appeal to CIOs making cost-benefit analyses. But there's a gut-level factor at play here, too.
Psychologically, it's well-known in risk analysis circles that people feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of the relative safety of the two forms of transport.
So naturally there's some fear with cloud computing: it means you can't reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data center servers.
Google showed this status warning during Tuesday's outage.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One prime example is the Trust.salesforce.com site, which shows the response time for a Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems happened, what they affected, and what caused them.
"We've found working with our customers they want transparency. They want to know exactly what's going on all the time," said Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com's vice president of corporate strategy. "If there's an issue, they're not furious; they just want to know exactly what's going on."
Amazon.com, too, offers a basic status report dashboard for Amazon Web Services. "A service dashboard is something our developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as soon as possible," said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.
"Own your own risk"
And some others are even trying to make a business out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-source monitoring and management software company Hyperic, which launched a CloudStatus service in June that monitors Amazon Web Services in greater detail. The company is working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too, including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing.
"You can't get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the adoption of the cloud," she said.
Amazon Web Services shows what's working or not. (Click image to see larger version.)
Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers, Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this week.
"With the docs outage, we posted immediately in the administrative console that there was an issue. We posted to the help center and the phone line system that we were working quickly to resolve it," Chandra said.
Asked whether Google plans its own status dashboard, Chandra wouldn't share details but promised better help for users. "We're trying to find even more ways to be more transparent about reliability," he said.
Risks of non-cloud computing, too
Much ado can and should be made of the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks. Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty servers, is a serious problem there, too.
Those with high-end services boast of "five nines" of reliability, where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google's Gmail SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours per year.
That might not be five nines, and it's for Gmail only today, but Google chooses to see the glass as half full.
"We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than most organizations with their internal service today," Chandra said.
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