I believe it was 1994 - maybe 1995 when I last talked with Eric Schmidt. I asked him a very direct question, "What is the killer app for the Web?" and he responded, "Groupware". Perhaps that was the Novell corporate line - but honestly, I think he believed it. For those who don't remember - Groupware was a term that involved electronic forms and workflow/collaboration.
I've been reading about Google becoming a business computing platform. If Google wants to be a business computing platform, they need two things:
flow.google.com
forms.google.com
Of course, this moves them from 'unstructured' data to 'structured' - and implies that Google attacks the identity / role problem. But let's get real - most business systems capture data, store it, aggregate it and redistribute it. During the process we monitor it and report on exceptions.
The world has been waiting for a clean simple way to do these common tasks. Google is in an excellent position to enable business 'Software as a Service'. The traditional problem with this approach has been accessing the data once your 'SaaS' provider collects it. Well, Google clearly understands that SOA and Web services provide a real nice vehicle for facilitating data transfers.
Come on Google - make my day.
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