Sightings in SaaS

Microsoft and Google recently announced their intentions to revisit WWI’s Battle of Passchendaele. There they will slug it out in mud up to their waste. Microsoft will try to lay waste to the encroaching Google empire with a frontal attack on Google’s search franchise. Google doesn’t want to die just in the trenches though, when there’s real glory out in the open field making a frontal assault on MS’s Windows operating system and Office applications.

Google is going to engineer a new pc operating system and has already released a set of online applications for creating documents and spreadsheets. They will also host your email if you are a fairly large company. MS now has Bing search and a new deal with Yahoo to run Yahoo’s search. My humble suggestion to General Balmer is that they take a look at how easy and useful Googles Adwords is for a customer to use, and then take a look at the completely useless and unfathomable Yahoo search application. This would be a small but welcome step in the right direction, but I digress.

Or perhaps I do not digress. In all the talk about the new MS/Yahoo search I have only seen one comment about the paid search advertising application that a company uses to put it’s short add on top or right side of the page. This common omission reveals the bias that you see not only in the media but in the companies involved, also. Thousands of enterprises, from the largest to the smallest, use search advertising as a way of putting their product or service in front of a person who is looking for that particular product or service. But the companies have only really talked about the searcher, not the searchee, in this whole affair. As is the norm now, the enterprise is forgotten. The whole purpose of search for Yahoo, MS and Google is to attract enterprises to place their adds for particular keywords. That’s the monetization part of search. Without it you wouldn’t have a Google.

But for all of the billions that Google and MS have made over the years from the coffers of the Enterprises that buy software or advertising, where is the payback? Where is the love, man? MS spends its every waking minute trying to engineer a new I-pod competitor (they finally put the Zune out of its misery last week), or trying to be #1 in children’s video game players. What do they have for the enterprise? How about Vista? How about 4 different business software application lines that they purchased and are now harvesting without any new development? How about Office, a perfect example of bloatware?

Google is headed in the same direction. Now that they are all rich with our cash, the enterprise is forgotten. They’re all about the consumer now. Consumer cell phones to compete with the I-phone. Consumer operating system for small computing devices. The small computing devices themselves. To wage war with MS Google will soon be on the shelves of the local mall.

If you are a corporate technology buyer at any level, you have to wonder how any of this helps you. Every year a greater and greater percenatage of your budget goes to these ingrates and what go you get in return? You get to buy your kid a new personal music device powered by Moogle? It’s more than sad or disappointing, it’s humiliating.

I’m all for competition and frankly I wish they could sell seats to this fight on pay per view. I’d pony up. But at some point the enterpise must ask why we are always paying for everyone else’s good time. When I buy a software service I want to know that part of my outlay is plowed back into the service to make it better, faster, more complete. Say what you want about Oracle, NetSuite or SAP, but at least they don’t turn my corporate IT budget into toys for teens.

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