Creating the customer for Google web apps
Google’s acquisition of wiki developer JotSpot represents another step forward for Google in creating customers for its online web applications. Google is mounting a classic low-end disruption attack against Microsoft’s dominant office suite in areas where mobility and collaboration are critical, and where rich levels of formatting, fonts, etc. are less important. JotSpot’s wiki capabilities join Google search, Gmail, Google Desktop, Google Notebook and Google’s new online Docs & Spreadsheets applications as part of a web-based suite that Google is assembling.
Is Google targeting higher education?
For Google’s web app initiative to succeed, it’s incumbent that Google create key customer groups who can become lead users for its online offering. Such groups might include collaboration-driven social and civic organizations, political groups, associations, clubs, NGO’s and non-profits . . . and so on.
However, one group might stand above the rest: the students, faculty and administrators of higher education. One can imagine a scenario where a Google server cluster at a university enables students to do research, take notes, write papers, create presentations and spreadsheets, and collaborate on class projects using (free) Google web apps and extensions. All the student would need is a standards-based browser such as Firefox or Camino.
This, of course, has major implications for education. It could expedite learning in the digital age, with standardized tools that are both simple and powerful. It means that a university’s students might be interacting and collaborating from anywhere in the world. There might even be a new form of university—as an ivy-covered wiki.
Will Google become the Nike of academics?
So maybe that’s Google’s plan: to use these web apps to provide the course work, writing and note-taking infrastructure for education, saving big bucks all around and providing new flexibility (and freedoms) for students, teachers, and administrators. If adopted on a wide scale, this might enable Google to become the Nike of academics. Not as a sponsor, of course, but as a universal presence configured to each institution’s needs. You might go to Harvard or Yale, and spend most of your time in Google.
If that’s the case, then Google already knows this customer fairly well.