Google hasn't integrated these features into something that approximates a Google Office for one reason: It doesn't want to. Why compete directly with a company that has more than $US30 billion in revenue and a monopoly on the desktop?

But there's another reason: Google isn't designed organizationally or philosophically to compete with Microsoft; it's designed to bypass it. Since its applications live on the Web, they aren't dependent on an operating system the same way desktop applications are.

"Microsoft in the 1980s allowed you to do tasks on a desktop that you could previously only do on a mainframe," says Marc West, CIO of the brokerage firm H&R Block. "They took computer power and moved it to the desktop. The same play is happening here. With the Web, you can self-select applications and piece them together into something you use. That's the difference between an operating system and an operating environment. You move from client/server to client/Web."

Google Eyes the Enterprise

The uptake of Web-based applications is growing in the consumer world because of the penetration of high-speed Internet access. Just a few years ago, work was the only place where people could use high-bandwidth applications. Today, more than 70 percent of Internet-connected homes in the US have broadband (locally, that number drops significantly to 30 percent). Furthermore, coffee shops, airports and even entire cities now offer high-speed wireless. Not only do near-ubiquitous connections have implications for how people consume technology, they also have ramifications for the nature of the new workforce.

"The wall between consumer and worker is dropping," says Google's Girouard. "People can work from anywhere. There's a real blurring of the line."

In the office, CIOs control the applications workers use. Usually these are client/server applications that have been chosen because they conform to a set of business requirements and meet the needs of the greatest number of employees. But outside the office, the users are in control, and users will choose whatever applications they feel make them more productive, says Steve Mullaney, VP of worldwide marketing for Bluecoat Systems, an Internet security company. "And, as a user, I like that my IT department has nothing to do with it," he adds.

The Web applications that your company's employees are using at home are raising their expectations for the applications they use at work. "People are people," says Girouard. "They don't turn into information scientists when they show up at work in the morning." Google believes that people no longer make a distinction between work and home when it comes to their expectations for technology, and its strategy for moving into the enterprise is based in large part on this analysis. "Why, for example, should I have two different calendars?" asks Girouard (one for work and one for home). "There are a lot of opportunities for us there."

Google is getting ready to chase these opportunities. The enterprise division accounts for less than 1 percent of the company's revenue, today, "but over the next five to 10 years, we will become a big part of Google", says Girouard.

John Battelle, publisher of Federated Media and author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, thinks five to 10 years is a conservative estimate. He points to the Google Pack, a suite of Web and desktop software capable of updating itself that Google released in January 2006, as a sign that Google understands that its future is as a software company.

"I would be stunned if in the next year they did not make a lot of noise in the enterprise space," says Battelle. "It is just too big to ignore."

Googling the Workplace

Today, Google's enterprise division has two products — corporate versions of its search and map tools — and just over 2500 customers. But the unit has opened support operations in the United Kingdom and Japan, and is growing its support group in California.

"Business intelligence is the place where Google has a foot in the door," says The Weather Channel's Shield. Google's enterprise search application indexes information on a user's desktop, the company's servers and, of course, the entire Internet. CIOs can configure it so that different users have access to different information. Google's enterprise search tool doesn't distinguish between the information on someone's desktop, the company's intranet or the Internet as a whole when it returns results: Information appears in the same browser window regardless of the source. "They are blurring the line between the inside of the company and the Internet," says Shield. "It's preparing you for the Web computing model."

Girouard isn't shy about talking about this. "When a CIO puts in an application," he says, "the user has no other choice." Conversely, Girouard believes that the home scenario, where users choose the applications they want, is a better model, and he thinks it will find its way into the workplace. That's a major shift in the way IT departments operate, but "CIOs need to be OK with some chaos", Girouard says. "They're too concerned with security and locking information down, but those aren't the things that will make a company great for the next 20 years.

"My message is: Think about the innovation engine in your company and what's driving it. What environment are you putting in place to make your company a place where people can innovate?"

According to Girouard, some of Google's products that could be configured for businesses in the near future include Gmail, the blogging tool Blogger, Talk (an instant messaging and VoIP service) and Orkut, a social networking tool that helps connect users with similar interests. In fact, Google announced in February that San Jose City College is currently testing a corporate version of Gmail that's hosted by Google but gives the college's network administrators all the controls of an in-house application. More generally, Girouard says, "We let things take root and mature on the consumer side. And where it makes sense, we'll bring something over to the enterprise."