LimitNone, a small software development company, is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the small company and misappropriating its trade secrets for its Google Apps online service.
Specifically, the suit concerns LimitNone software called gMove designed to let people move e-mail, contacts, and calendar information stored in Microsoft Outlook to Google's online service. Google initially helped LimitNone develop, promote, and sell the product, assuring LimitNone it wouldn't offer a competing product, but then reversed course by giving away its own tool, Google E-mail Uploader, to premier-level Google Apps customers, the lawsuit said.
"With gMove priced at $19 per copy and Google's prediction that there were potentially 50 million users, Google deprived LimitNone of a $950 million opportunity by offering Google's competitive product for free as a part of its 'premier' Google Apps package," the lawsuit, filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois.
Google didn't immediately comment for this story.
LimitNone had shared confidential technical and sales forecast details with Google, the lawsuit said.
"Without Google's knowledge and use of the gMove trade secrets and confidential information, Google would not have been able to solve its longstanding Microsoft Outlook to Gmail conversion problem," the lawsuit said. "At a minimum, Google's access to the internal workings of gMove allowed it to gain a significant head start on designing the inner workings for a competing application."
Google's product "copied gMove's look, feel, functionality, and distribution model, including several unique and proprietary operations," the suit said.
And in May 2008, Google changed its user interface, breaking gMove compatibility and forcing the company to provide customer refunds.
The complaint alleges Google misappropriated trade secrets from LimitNone and violated fraud law by inducing LimitNone to share confidential information Google used to develop its competing product.
Google's AppEngine looks great. It's a way to build web applications and run them on Google's "cloud" infrastructure.
The downside? Your applications effectively become Google's applications because there's no easy way to move them elsewhere. You have to run them using Google's authentication engine, framework, file system, APIs, etc. Free as in Google's.
Enter Morph Labs.
[Morph] claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon's Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in....
... Read more
As people get their heads around Google App Engine, they see some things they may not like. Namely, the dreaded "lock-in."
Developers for years have been clamoring for more openness and standards. They are tenets of the open-source movement.
But as more application development moves to hosted platforms, does data and application portability get lost in "the cloud"?
Given that we're at an early point in platform-as-a-service offerings, I'd say lock-in, to some degree, is inevitable. Most people consider Salesforce.com's Force.com closed, as it's based on the company's database and query language.
But Google? The search giant is hosting a Web development conference next month, not to sell more software stacks or subscriptions, but to encourage more apps--and people--to move to the Web, it says.
Still, O'Reilly takes Google to task for the lack of application portability--at least in this first iteration of Google App Engine.
"Now, it may be that this is a temporary oversight, and that Google does intend, long-term, to make it easy for developers to export their applications. After all, Eric Schmidt says he reminds his employees all the time, "Don't fight the Internet."
But it's also possible that this is one more sign that one of the big guys is forgetting the principles--the Internet as a platform (not "my company as a platform"), harnessing the power of user contribution (which, as John Musser pointed out, means that you always "pay the user first"), small pieces loosely joined--that brought their success in the first place.
Think his concerns are overblown? He's not the only one.
Within a few days of its release, programmer Chris Anderson wrote some open-source software, called AppDrop, that shows that you can conceivably run an instance written for Google App Engine on Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon's hosted server platform.
Developer Alex Bosworth listed lock-in as his top concern with Google App Engine.
It's likely that Google will allow applications written with other languages, like JavaScript. But the nub of online-platform lock-in comes from the data store, Bosworth said.
One thing both Amazon and Google could do to really show they are serious about their platforms is open up their data engines, which are really the core of most Web applications--open-source BigTable and SimpleDB. This would really reduce lock-in and make development easier, and it might even lead to some help improving their services.
O'Grady at RedMonk, too, argued that Google should open-source portions of its infrastructure or offer an API (application programming interface) to its data store that would ease portability to other databases.
Google appears to already be on the case of data portability. On the Google App Engine Blog, software engineer Kevin Gibbs said that one planned feature is large-scale data import and export.
"With Google App Engine, you own all the data in your app. As stated in our terms, you always have the right to get your data out of Google App Engine at any point. We wouldn't have it any other way," Gibbs wrote.
Once again, Google gets tongues a-waggin', even when it isn't the first to a party.
But it's good to see these issues raised and for developers to push for more openness. After all, standards, portability, and interoperability have been good to the Web.
Updated at 8:45 a.m. PT with information from Google App Engine blog on planned data migration tools.What do you get when you cross Amazon's EC2 on-demand cloud computing infrastructure with Google's new App Exchange foundation for Web applications?
It's hard to say what the union could produce besides ugly children. But it's not just a hypothetical hybrid: programmer Chris Anderson has released software called AppDrop that brings App Exchange to EC2. Programmer Andy Baio spotlighted the development Monday on his blog.
OK, now I need to mention the caveat that this isn't really one cloud computing foundation running inside another.
In fact, Anderson just has the single-computer version of Google's App Engine software running on EC2 rather than the real online one. That means software written with Google's App Engine software developer kit can run on EC2 servers, but it can't take advantage of some of the central features of App Engine. For example, it stores data on that particular server and can't employ Google's BigTable data-storage service to tap into Google's large and load-balanced infrastructure.
Baio quotes Anderson as saying there's room for database improvement, though, including software that could bridge to the more conventional MySQL database software.
"It wouldn't be that hard to write a Python adapter to MySQL that would preserve the BigTable API," or application programming interface, Anderson is quoted as saying. "And while that wouldn't be quite as scalable as BigTable, we've all seen that MySQL can take you pretty far."
Salesforce.com's tie-in with Google Apps makes Salesforce the complete center of the user's universe.
But in a new-school twist, neither of these applications completely locks you in. You can get your data out, if you need to (albeit somewhat painfully) from Salesforce, and since you have your Google e-mail stored outside of the Salesforce system, you can effectively leave whenever you want and resplit the applications, should you so desire.
While the technical details are not totally clear, this appears to be an example of Web-oriented architecture, or it at least demonstrates the idea that an abstraction layer allows for data to be more easily integrated. Or maybe it's PaaS (platform as a service)--I am sure it's some acronym.
The theoretical benefits of the combined service outweigh the negatives (mainly clarity around service-level agreements, security, and Google's perpetual beta tests)-at least for now.
... Read more
Updated April 14, 5:20 AM PDT to reflect official announcement.
It has hardly been a well-kept secret. Now, Salesforce.com and Google have made it official: they're linking up to offer Salesforce's CRM (customer relationship management) applications with integrated Google Apps.
The companies on Monday announced that Salesforce.com's customers now have the option of using versions of Google Apps, Gmail, Calendar, and Google Talk that are tightly linked to Salesforce.com (see Techmeme for more coverage).
What does that mean? An e-mail response from a customer can be appended to the customer information stored within Salesforce.com, meaning that all customer interaction can be accessed from a single place, for instance. That dynamic applies to Google Talk conversations and other applications, too.
Salesforce customers will be able to access Gmail, Google Apps, Calendar, and Google Talk from within Salesforce.com CRM applications.
(Credit: Salesforce.com)This isn't a new function of Salesforce.com. The company has offered integration with Microsoft's Office and Outlook desktop applications for some time. But this is the company's first foray into offering a more wide-ranging Web-based application package, cutting the ties to desktop applications.
Salesforce.com says this isn't some marketing-driven move; its customers, through a Salesforce.com online forum called Idea Exchange, requested integration with Google Apps.
So will Salesforce.com make a similar deal with Microsoft for Office Live, the company's online complement to Office, when that becomes a more capable alternative to desktop apps? "Salesforce.com is open to working with a myriad of office applications. What made this possible is that Salesforce and Google...both deliver native Web applications," said Kraig Swensrud, vice president of Applications at Salesforce.com.
"We're looking to (Idea Exchange) for what people want us to build. People voted for Google Apps," he said. Swensrud expects that a "huge" percentage of Salesforce.com's customer base will be interested in the new feature.
Likewise, Google hasn't ruled out working with other partners. "We're committed to advancing the Web as the platform and partners are key to our growth, whether it's a developer doing custom applications and gadgets, a company like Appirio making calendar sharing even easier, or Salesforce.com deeply integrating Google Apps into their CRM products," said Scott McMullan, Google Apps partner lead, Google Enterprise.
Salesforce.com won't charge for the integration with Google Apps. Existing customers will get it for no additional charge. So far, 10 Salesforce.com customers have tested the integration in a beta test mode, said Swensrud.
There is a profit motive here, however. The company will offer a service called Salesforce for Google Apps Supported that will include telephone support for end users, unified billing and provisioning, and additional application programming interfaces for a fee of $10 per user, per month.
Correction: the original article misattributed comments to the two Google executives I interviewed. The attributions have been changed.
Google's move on Wednesday to open up an online shop for third-party Google Apps add-ons, called Google Solutions Marketplace, may make more people take Web widgets more seriously--even enterprise developers.
Widgets, or gadgets, allow people to embed small applets within a Web page for things like displaying the weather, or set alarms on a PC or other Web device.
A motion chart made with Google gadgets, a way to customize Google Docs.
(Credit: Google)But Google Gadgets is also one way that Google encourages software developers to customize Google Apps.
In March, Google launched a visualization API (application programming interface) for its Google Docs and a gallery of gadgets that use the API. With it, people can display data from a Google Web spreadsheet in a variety of ways, like a pie chart, map, time chart, or funnel chart.
But that visualization API is the beginning of more to come, Google executives told me back in March. And gadgets allow you to tap those APIs to customize Google applications.
The ability to tailor applications for a specific purpose or industry is very important to businesses, and thus any company trying to sell to them.
Microsoft refers to Office as a "platform" that can be customized with its flagship Visual Studio programming tool.
Salesforce.com has invested heavily in AppExchange and its Force.com hosted development platform to create an ecosystem of third-party add-ons and hosted applications.
The advantage of the gadgets approach is that it's relatively simple--a Webmaster could put something together. Also, gadgets are portable to other Web pages, like iGoogle's customized home page.
"Gadgets are a very approachable coding model and you can do surprisingly useful things very quickly," said Sam Schillace, the engineering director who oversees collaborative applications at Google. "We haven't been shy about talking about programming the Web in smaller pieces and gadgets work really well."
Another benefit to the gadget approach, from Google's perspective, is that they are "native to the Internet," in that they are written using Ajax and designed to run in the "cloud."
Google is hosting its second developer conference in May, called Google I/O, to encourage developers to write more applications for the Web. On Monday, it launched Google App Engine, a place where they can test and host those applications.
Jonathan Rochelle, senior product manager who manages the spreadsheet editor at Google Docs, said he wrote a gadget to translate content in Google Docs. Another simple example is creating charts for soccer team statistics, he said.
But in the context of a business, one could imagine more complicated applications. For example, a business could mash up information from an order management system and customer database and then present it in a Google spreadsheet for its customers to view over the Web.
How far Google's gadgets approach will go into business is not clear yet as it's early on. But it's obvious that gadgets makes sense for businesspeople--even SAP is doing it.
Now it's a question of how far developers can push the limits of this gadget business.
TechCrunch is reporting that Salesforce.com will announce on Monday a deal to resell Google online applications such as Google Docs to its customers.
It's unverified at this point, but TechCrunch points to a Google Operating System blog post that details several bits of evidence that could point to some integration.
Salesforce.com and Google share a vision of transforming computing tasks that today happen on corporate PCs or servers onto services available across the Internet.
Salesforce.com declined to comment on the report. Update 9:09 p.m.: So did Google.
Gmail users running short on storage are getting a reprieve starting today. The company has announced they'll be increasing the speed in which they've been adding storage to their popular e-mail service, along with bumps to Google Apps users. You might have seen the storage counter that's been running on the Gmail's start page, which is nearing the 3 GB mark bit by bit--and now, it's doing it just a little bit faster. Meanwhile, Google Apps users are getting a slightly better end of the deal. Standard and Educational users are getting a size match with Gmail's offerings, while the Premier gets an extra 15GB, bringing their cap to 25GB.
The one thing missing from any of this newly added storage is a place to dump files--or the long awaited "Gdrive." The closest thing Google actually has to a file dump is with their Google Groups service, which caps total file storage at 100 MB. In comparison, competitors like Microsoft are taking their own initiative with the Windows Live SkyDrive service, which bumped up its limit to 1GB last night, and Yahoo's somewhat crippled Briefcase service which gives users a paltry 25MB of shared storage to share only with other registered Yahoo users (incidentally this is about the attachment size limit for Gmail).
I still think Google is sending mixed messages with their "infinity + 1" concept, which promotes the idea of offering users unlimited storage. The only caveat there is it's on Google's terms, and they'll only make adjustments to the storage limit when they see fit--like today. At the same time, the company is quietly promoting their paid storage add-on service, which sells yearly subscriptions of extra storage to your Google account, ranging up to an additional 400GB. This bodes well for the eventual rollout of the fabled GDrive, but if anyone's expecting copious amounts of free storage beyond what the big G is currently offering, don't hold your breath.
Several signs are pointing to the imminent launch of Google Wiki and the company's long-awaited presentation service at this week's Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
The biggest indicators are history and vague comments by Google officials. Last year's Office 2.0 brought the launch of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and Jonathan Rochelle, the product manager for Google Spreadsheets, will also be at hand for the opening panel at the conference kickoff on Thursday. Between this, an almost-demo by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt of the presentation application, as well as a post on the Official Google Blog that presentations would be making their way to everyone "this summer," and we should be seeing something new as early as Thursday.
The new wiki application from Google would fill out its online office suite, and give Google Apps a little more appeal for small- and mid-size business customers who want a consolidated wiki solution. The launch would also coincide with the anniversary of Google's acquisition of wiki service JotSpot (review) last October. Considering JotSpot served up multiple tiers of service to serve casual to business users, the model could follow suit with Google's four flavors of Google Apps, including their business and enterprise solutions.
However, the trail of clues about how these services will tie into Google's existing online office environment is thin. There have been few signs of Google's presentation service making an early appearance since the acquisition of Zenter and Tonic Systems a few months ago. From the outside, the clearest indicator has been the move of Jotspot's user help and forums services over to Google's own native support network.
Stay tuned.
