A long but good read in the NY Times today and it's clear that battles lines are being drawn - by the press if not the two companies. I like Google - they make great software and are clearly very smart. However, as they move in to business (or enterprise) computing, the rules are slightly different from what I've seen. Eric Schmidt knows this far better than I do from his days at Sun and Novell which makes it all the more surprising that he makes this quote:

VELOCITY does, indeed, matter, and Google deploys it to great effect. Conventional software is typically built, tested and shipped in two- or three-year product cycles. Inside Google, Mr. Schmidt says, there are no two-year plans. Its product road maps look ahead only four or five months at most. And, Mr. Schmidt says, the only plans “anybody believes in go through the end of this quarter.”

Sure, speed is good but so is predictability for these large organisations and changing code on the fly every few weeks simply isn't going to well, fly. Maybe I'm wrong. In fact I'm sure I am as these guys are way smarter than me but I can't help thinking they're underestimating the enterprise computing marketplace. I can't remember the last time I sat with a big corporate and talked about roadmap's and they didn't want to talk about 2-3 years out.

It's not that I don't envy Google's speed of release and update - I do. It works well for consumers and keeps them feeling that Google cares about them due to updates and is innovating. For an IT director that could easily translate in to Google doesn't care about what changes Google makes have on HIS IT department and that their innovation hampers his ability to predict and provide Service Level Agreements.

I'm sure I'm wrong though? Right?

[update - some additional interesting views around this topic]