What people havn't understood yet is that Google is a product company and not a service company.
Despite all the nice talk about consumerisation of IT, corporate cusomers want a service company. A company that picks up the phone, engages itself with an SLA and actually puts the Customer First.
Google is miles away from such a corporate culture.
This does not mean that the SAAS market does not have a very bright future, just that the winners will probably be focused companies considering this their core busines. Check out companies such as http://www.contactoffice.com/http://www.37signals.com/
ContactOffice is a collaborative and messaging platform offered in Software as a Service.
ContactOffice's has recently rewritten its entire UI using Google Web Toolkit. In order to do so they had to add numerous features to GWT (drag and drop, marquee selection, contextual menus, sortable columns, resizable panels). It is according to Google engineers one of the largest and most advanced web application built using their framework. Joel Webber the co-founder of GWT endorsed the work done at CO at: http://blog.contactoffice.com/index.php/2008/01/03/nice-endorsement-for-contactoffice-by-gwt-team/.
The CTO Luc Claes was invited by Google to present the work done at the last JAVAONE conference.
You can also find some other GWT applications on the following site:
http://www.ongwt.com/category/GWT-Application
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What people havn't understood yet is that Google is a product company and not a service company. Despite all the nice talk about consumerisation of IT, corporate cusomers want a service company. A company that picks up the phone, engages itself with an SLA and actually puts the Customer First. Google is miles away from such a corporate culture. This does not mean that the SAAS market does not have a very bright future, just that the winners will probably be focused companies considering this their core busines. Check out companies such as http://www.contactoffice.com/ http://www.37signals.com/
ContactOffice is a collaborative and messaging platform offered in Software as a Service. ContactOffice's has recently rewritten its entire UI using Google Web Toolkit. In order to do so they had to add numerous features to GWT (drag and drop, marquee selection, contextual menus, sortable columns, resizable panels). It is according to Google engineers one of the largest and most advanced web application built using their framework. Joel Webber the co-founder of GWT endorsed the work done at CO at: http://blog.contactoffice.com/index.php/2008/01/03/nice-endorsement-for-contactoffice-by-gwt-team/. The CTO Luc Claes was invited by Google to present the work done at the last JAVAONE conference. You can also find some other GWT applications on the following site: http://www.ongwt.com/category/GWT-Application