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>> HARDY: Well, that's all for me for now. With that, I'd like to bring on stage Dave
Girouard, who's the president of Enterprise at Google. Dave started his career at Accenture.
He was doing systems integration work there. He moved to Booz Allen. Then he was at Apple.
Then he was at a video search company called Virage. Dave joined Google in 2004, six years
ago, just in case you're thinking the guy couldn't hold a job. And in 2007 he was key
in in the introduction of Google Apps. Now, last year, Dave told VentureBeat that, I believe,
this year Google Apps would be the Microsoft Office killer. InformationWeek was kind enough
to brand him "not totally nuts" based on that prediction. I'm taking it on faith, Dave,
so why don't you come on up and tell us your plan for world domination.
>> GIROUARD: Thanks. Thanks. It's great to start out introduced as not totally nuts.
So I appreciate that. Uh, just a little bit nuts, which might be good. Anyway, when we
branded this event, we definitely anticipated sort of the soft, white, fluffy version of
the cloud, as opposed to the gray, stormy one, but even in Northern California the weather
doesn't always agree with you, but since we're all inside, we're gonna make the best of it.
But this event, when it came together, we had to think through a few things, what sort
of event we wanted to create, you know. There's always a struggle about, "Is it just a general
industry event? Is it an advocacy event? Are we advocating the cloud, or are we here to
debate the cloud?" And then the other sort of side of it is, "Is is a Google event, or
do we really want to make it an industry event?" And there's no really pure answer to that.
We want to make it a compelling event more than anything. Clearly, there are those of
us who are very much bought into the cloud, and I think we'll be fairly transparent about
that, but we do want to engage in the right sort of debate about the cloud, and we have
invited a lot of folks from around the industry, because we wanted to make it a very informed--and
a broad debate. But you're gonna get plenty of Google as well. I think people, if they
come to the Google headquarters would leave disappointed if they didn't get to see some
of the cool things in the works from Google. Cloud computing. Wow. It's sort of at a level
of which almost anybody in IT or in technology just hears about it almost minute by minute.
And it has reached the level of kind of hype, or--is almost unprecedented. And there's certainly
something about cloud computing that pushes buttons on people more so than almost any
other technology transition in history. You think about the coming of the PC into the
large corporations, when it was a mainframe-based world, you think about, you know, relational
databases taking over from hierarchical databases, whatever sort of--you know, Wi-Fi networks
coming in, all of those had elements of controversy and debate, but I'm not sure there's ever
been one that has this amount of strident discussion and debate, because, you know,
it is so fundamentally disruptive to how things are done, and I think it's a testament both
to how big and disruptive this can and will be, and of the many, many issues that need
to be resolved before this really is all the way there. I think for those of us who are
into cloud computing, who have done this, we all have had at some point in time a cloud-computing
moment, you know, where we sort of get this thing, and we start to appreciate what is
really neat and different about it. And even though it's not all perfect and there's shortcomings
and all the apps and services aren't perfect yet, I think any of us can sort of identify
a moment, and for me it was three years ago. About three years ago I--We had just launched
these products. Google had already been on our own apps services for about five or six
months at the time, and I went to a Giants' game up in the city, and for those who know,
I parked my car right by the-- where they had the driving range. And if you know where
that is, you know that was probably a slight lack of judgment in doing so. But I came out
of the game, and no surprise, but my back window was broken, and my entire laptop bag
was gone, and my passport, and my computer, of course, and everything else. And for most
people, you know, that is a traumatic thing. And, again, losing my passport was a traumatic
thing, 'cause I was leaving the country in a few days. But that aside, the interesting
thing is I had, the next morning, a presentation to a large group. Not quite this large, but
a large group at 9:00 a.m., and I had done a lot of prep work, this and that. The beauty
of the thing was, first of all, I lost nothing. There was no risk of data loss, because there
was little to no data on that computer. And there was no productivity loss. In fact, the
next morning, I got into work, and the most exceptional Google Help Desk folks were already
at work at 8:00 in the morning, and I actually decided at that time I would switch from the
PC to the Mac, which I had been--I had left Apple years ago, and sort of gone the other
way entirely, and that was the start of my move back to the Mac, but it was really compelling,
that, literally, without any loss of productivity and with no loss-- not only to have no data
loss, I could move to an entirely new PC--desktop platform at once. And that, to me, was the
cloud-computing moment that said, "Wow, this is why this is really neat. This is why it's
special." And I think people have different experiences. But the debate goes on. So what
I want to do for a few minutes is just talk about the debate as it exists, and--because
I think we all hear about it so much, and then I am gonna transition and talk about
some of Google's specific viewpoints on the cloud, and what we're gonna try to do. So
trust is the most central element of cloud computing, I think. It's gotten to the point
where this is the ultimate question. Last fall, The Economist did sort of a survey.
It was actually part of a debate between Marc Benioff from Salesforce and Stephen Elop from
Microsoft, about, you know, can you trust the cloud? And they both gave very passioned
answers to that. And, in the end, you know, readers were asked to vote, and this is how
it came out. Fairly split. And that may not be surprising to anybody. If you read the
comments that were associated with it, the passion with which people wrote their comments
and how they felt about this thing to me is what really jumped off the page was, "Can
the cloud be trusted?" That is fundamentally the question. And when you say, "Can the cloud
be trusted?" what you're really saying is "Can I trust others to take care of these
important parts of my business for me? Can they protect my data? Can they deliver a mission-critical
service to me in a way that will not disrupt my business? Can I trust the way that they
build new versions of the products and how they come out?" And it's a very complicated
question, and it's not one that's gonna be answered overnight for every business. I should
say, though, that it's interesting that, you know, Salesforce, really, has been in business
for ten years or so, and done an amazing job, really, as the flag bearers of cloud computing,
the guys who were doing it pretty much before anybody. At least at scale. And a phenomenal
track record. Cloud computing in its first ten years has not had major catastrophes.
It's not had enormous blow-ups. I mean, a service outage here and there, yes, but an
amazing number of small businesses, increasingly large businesses, have been benefitting from
the cloud, and getting a lot of the things the cloud promises. And we're now a decade
into this. It's actually not entirely new. So I think it's a pretty compelling way to
think about it. I'm gonna talk--show you a few quotes, and it's really telling. A lot
of times, the quotes say more about the person saying it than they do about the cloud, but
I think it's fascinating to look at the way that some different parts of the industry
look at this. "Customers understand that cloud systems typically outshine..." Shine. It's
not shining today, but... "Their own in terms of reliability and security." Sometimes it
can be fairly predictable. And we're pretty predictable too. We're advocates for the cloud
just like Salesforce is. So you're gonna hear consistent statements out of those of us who
are true believers. "Cloud computing is fundamentally about re-engineering the world's computing
infrastructure, to enable game-changing and even life-changing applications." I like this
one. IBM. I've known Willy for years, and you can always, you know, you can always count
on IBM to take it out of the sort of nit and grit of IT, up into the higher level of things,
like, you know, greener cities, smarter cities, what have you. You know, but of course, IBM,
they're a little less concerned of what, you know, what sort of ingredients go into your
solution, or what sort of materials you use to build your house, provided that they're
the general contractor. So it's a very IBM-like view on the world. Here's another one. "Cloud
computing continues to proceed on its merry way through the trough of disillusionment."
You sort of picture somebody sitting at a kitchen table in the morning with bleary eyes,
looking at an empty bottle of whiskey or something, when you read this. And maybe it won't shock
anybody. A Gartner analyst. "The trough of disillusionment." It's just quite a statement.
Let's look at another one. "Cloud computing is water vapor." This one, you don't have
to guess. You probably all know this one. Larry Ellison. Now, Ellison's point, really,
is, you know, it's the same stuff, right? There's hard drives, there's middleware, there's
databases, there's applications. What's the difference? The ingredients are all the same.
And it's true. It is absolutely true. The ingredients are the same. It's the recipe
that is very different. And I think the hard part that Larry has with all of this is that
it is much more compelling from his perspective to sell the recipe than it is to bake the
cake, which is the nature of cloud computing. "The cloud will not be trusted with all aspects
of computing." Almost hard to argue with this. It's a very measured statement from Mr. Elop
from Microsoft. A very statesman-like--very-- Clearly true. Clearly true. But it obviously--This
is sort of the software plus services, like, "Yes, we like this, kind of, sort of," view.
"We are experiencing a disruptive moment in the history of technology" with the advent
of cloud-based computing. Stephen Elop again. Now we're leaning a little more to the all-in
frame of mind. And it's hard. I mean, this is--the world's evolving. This thing is changing
fast. "Cloud computing heralds an evolution of business that is no less influential than
e-business." Okay, now Gartner's kind of in the pool a little bit. At least another person
at Gartner. You can't expect any large organization, whether it's Google or Gartner, anybody, to
be entirely consistent. That's just not realistic. "By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT
assets." That too is Gartner. Now that's a compelling statement. It's probably fair to
say, depending how you count businesses, that may be true today. I'm not sure many doughnut
shops own a lot of ITSes. But, having said all that, it's a pretty shocking statement,
and I think it's interesting that it comes from Gartner. The debate about cloud computing
has clearly changed, and I want to share a few thoughts on how it has changed over the
years. And we, again, we were not really active participants, I would say, until 2007. We,
Google, that is. So, clearly, the starting point of cloud computing was cost savings.
"Why buy all this stuff? Why buy all the computers? Just subscribe and pay little bits per month,
and have at it." So it is clearly the starting point of cloud computing in the early and
mid 2000s. Why not? It doesn't do what I need. It lacks the features and functions I need
to for any particular business process, or what have you. Our users won't be happy, our
business processes can't be implemented, et cetera, et cetera. And so it was a cost versus
features and functions. And that is the very obvious, I think, starting point. That changed
a bit. I think purely being about cost has changed, because it begun to occur to people
that a lot of this was about speed and innovation, both in their business, how quickly and quick
and agile a business can be in terms of adapting to conditions, in terms of its ability to
access new technology without going through major, major upgrades and implementations
and huge cost expenditures. So I think speed and innovation became central to cloud computing
a few years ago. Now, what became the "why not" as cloud computing moved into bigger
businesses, this really started to drive. Customization. I need to customize to my business
process. I need to integrate with my on-premise technology that I've invested a lot in, and
which is not going away, and I'm very concerned about whether these things will be reliable,
uh, so I can, you know, depend on these for my employees. Where it is today, what I think,
certainly in the Fortune 1,000, what is driving cloud computing actually is getting beyond
IT. It's getting into fundamental shifts in industries where we can tell, and we see who's,
obviously where we sit, who is very interested in this, and why they're very interested,
and I really do believe it is about tectonic shifts in industries that are beyond the realm
of IT, but IT really is heavily affected by that. Every large business today is affected
by changes of the competitive dynamics in their industries. Whether it's, you know,
a regional business becoming a global business, a global business having to compete with low-cost
providers from around the world, the ability to attract and retain people out of university
when you need to do so. So a lot of changes about how the--how, um, businesses compete
are trickling down to IT and the infrastructure you put in place to operationalize that business.
And I think that is as much what's driving interest in cloud-computing as anything else.
And, again, what's the fundamental question? It's trust. I think people are getting very
comfortable with the fact that there's enough features and functions. "This will work for
me." And it's also all growing up so quickly that if we are missing something today, it's
quite likely it won't be missing tomorrow. And I think even the reliability people are
getting more and more confident in. While not perfect, I think it is absolutely true
that the large cloud-computing vendors can deliver services more reliable than your own,
and I think people are really beginning to appreciate that. But the trust element is
still there, and I think it is the final hurdle to cross before we can really make it there.
I'm gonna talk a bit about Google's sort of view on this, which, again, from our point
of view, we grew up in the cloud. We were born of the cloud, you know? As a company,
we didn't exist in the old world. So, obviously, we think of it very differently than a lot
of others do. Cloud computing, how is it defined? Actually, one of the biggest debates is just
saying what is cloud computing and what isn't, and I always feel like this debate is a little
more semantic than substantive. You know, whether you call something a private cloud,
or whether you just call it a virtualized data center, it doesn't matter that much.
We do feel a little bit like the term was co-opted, frankly, but in the end, that's
semantics. I think we do believe there will be, you know, people will have on-premise,
and they'll own data centers for a long time, but for us, this is what cloud computing is.
Hosted. Hosted means somebody else owns it. And, to us, this is actually fundamental.
If someone's gonna build you a big old cloud, that's not cloud computing in our world. The
litmus test of cloud computing is someone else is spending a lot CAPEX so you can spend
just a little bit of OPEX when you need it, on a relative basis. That, to me, is the litmus
test of cloud computing. Shared infrastructure. So outsourcing and having somebody else just
build it and run it for you, you get some of the benefits, but, frankly, the economics
don't really work at scale. You really need shared infrastructure. You need to have all
the compute power you need when you need it, and you need to not be paying for it when
you don't need it. There's only one way that happens, and that's for that infrastructure
to be shared amongst many tenants. And this is probably one of the parts that gives people
the most heebie-jeebies about cloud computing, but I think people are starting to understand
it. And delivered via the web browser. And this is really important, because one of the
important elements of cloud computing over time, as I will talk about in a minute, is
the devices, the ability for users to access their information in ways that work for them
on virtually any type of device they want to access it with. And the web browser really
is the defining element. It is the platform that allows you to do so. It does explain
why Google got into the browser business, and we'll talk a lot about that through the
day. From our perspective, there's really three things that come together to make cloud
computing compelling, the three tenants of it. I'm gonna talk through each of these,
and I'm gonna talk about how I believe they can transform a large business over a period
of time, as they come together. Applications, platforms, and devices. This is, from my perspective,
the foundation of cloud computing. So let me talk for a second about the way most of
our companies grew up. I call it facilities-based computing. You know, this is how companies
were built for 10, 20, 30 years, which is, for the most part, most of their workers worked
in a few large facilities. Except for a small number of multi-nationals, most companies
were in one country. Maybe they're in two or three countries. But they built big facilities
where everybody worked. They more or less left at the end of the day and left their
work there. Sometimes you had second or third shifts, depending on the nature of your work,
but everything was there. When it says "firewall" here, it's actually a direct reference, and
also sort of an indirect reference. It's direct in that everything generally has been protected
by firewalls. The nature of firewalls and their utility as a means of protecting things
is much in debate, even separate from cloud computing, and I think everybody knows firewalls
are changing, and people's viewpoints about how to best protect information is changing,
but for the sake of argument, think of it as the firewall, but also where you spend
your resources and your effort as a company, and where most of your resources, both people
resources and technical resources reside. The facilities-based model was built on a
world where people came to work 9:00 to 5:00, they did their work amongst a close-knit set
of people, they went home at the end of the day. That's not the reality anymore. In fact,
it's not been the reality for even probably 10 or 15 years. So the IT infrastructure that
was started like this began to be distorted, to really help a company become global, become
flexible, become competitive, to deal with contractors, to deal with, you know, joint
R&D when two companies work together. It's tried to map into that world, but it's been
very hard. So along comes the first notion of cloud computing. Your applications all
of a sudden can go outside, can be outside this--in the firewall, or, again, your focus
as a company sort of shrinks a little bit, okay? And you become a little more focused,
and you have Salesforce really leading the charge, when they launched CRM quite a while
ago. You have services like email and collaboration from Google and Microsoft and others. But
also you have some choices. And sort of the locus of your IT and what you're really trying
to spend your dollars and your time on has gotten much more focused. This is the application
side. These are just the wholly built applications built by many, many providers now. It's certainly
not just us. There's Workday and there's Zoho, and there's many others. And they've all kind
of come in and said, "There's more and more of these applications. There's gonna be more
of them every day. You're gonna have a lot of choices." And, interesting, there's a lot
of great work going on to make them work together quite well, which I won't go into here, but
I think it is pretty compelling. Now, platforms, really, and it sort of depends on your perspective,
but from our perspective, platforms really come along next, which says, "Look, we're
not gonna build every application you want." Large businesses do need custom-built applications
and workflows, and those too you ought to be able to put outside into the cloud, and
you ought to be able to have a lot of flexibility about where you need them, when you need them.
If you want to go into Southeast Asia, it should not mean you have to go build a data
center in Southeast Asia. You ought to have some choices. And that's really what platforms
imply. Now, there's a lot of choices of platform. Amazon Web Services probably the most famous.
Force.com from Salesforce. We're out there with App Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure,
so a lot of choices. There will be plenty of choices. But platforms really says it's
not just about the packaged apps. There's actually gonna be ability to take your own
developers and build things just for yourself, as well as get things from smaller companies,
who you might otherwise not be able to access. And again, the firewall gets a bit smaller,
if you will. Now, what about devices? The interesting thing about cloud computing is
as most of your people start to do most of their work in a browser, in a neutral fashion,
there's a lot of compelling choices that come into play. All a sudden, that traditional
desktop is not necessarily the answer for everybody, because a browser-based way of
accessing information means, all a sudden, whether it's laptops, whether it's desktops,
whether it's phones, etcetera, these can begin to be pushed outside. You can also think of
this as things inside that little blue circle are things you own and you manage, and you
have to have a return on assets, if you will. Outside that are things you don't necessarily
need to own. And, uh, this explains a lot why you'll see from Google Chrome OS, which
is really an OS designed for cloud computing from the beginning, as opposed to it being
something conceived of later, and our Android mobile system. And these are, to us, very
fundamental, and will become more and more important to our cloud computing story for
the Enterprise. You're gonna see a lot about Chrome OS and Android today. We have some
of the product executives from those areas that are gonna speak later today. [pause]
So, um, at this point, I think it's important to say, first of all, we anticipate that people
are gonna have data centers, mainframes--IBM mainframes never seem to go away. We don't
anticipate they're gonna go away. And maybe a lot of things like ERP are gonna stay inside,
those things that are your core, your focus. And I'm not gonna say things that are in someone
else's sort of domain of expertise. But we do believe-- We're not religious in the sense
of thinking entire businesses, certainly Fortune 1000 size businesses are gonna move to the
cloud. But we think a large fraction of things that you do and manage will go to the cloud.
The other important thing I'm going to say is we fundamentally believe that the proper
cloud architecture is gonna make your company more secure, not less, because your people
are traveling anyway. They started traveling with laptops years ago. They have been using
VPN. They've been using whatever means of accessing information. They've been forwarding
their emails to consumer accounts, because they can't get proper access. So all sorts
of things. They take things away in thumb drives, because they want to use it on their
home computer. So all sorts of things just happen, and it's not because anybody's evil.
It's because the fundamental architecture was designed for another world, a world where
you came to work and went home at 5:00. And we fundamentally believe that the cloud can
be more secure, 'cause it's designed for this world, and allows you to focus on protecting
those crown jewels in the middle, but also more secure on the perimeter. And the other
thing I would say is it really opens up a lot of possibilities. I like to describe it
as the asset-free computing model, right? Actually, Gartner said this a while ago, that
a lot of companies are moving towards a bring your own model, bring your own computer, bring
your own mobile device, and that absolutely makes, you know, traditional IT people's heads
spin in a circle, to think of the manageability and the security issues with that. The cloud
can support that. It's not to say that it won't take some time to get all the pieces
and parts together, but we fundamentally believe a model where you, instead of buying somebody
a laptop, instead of buying somebody a phone, you can give them a stipend every month, and
say, "Decide what makes best sense for you," without in any sense compromising the security
of the information in your business. [pause] So that's a brief overview. We do actually,
you know, fundamentally believe the cloud is moving forward, and it's moving forward
fast. And as a lot of bigger companies have moved onto Google and started using Google--we
like to call it going Google. They have typically focused on the messaging side of our products,
on Gmail, on our Calendar product, and on instant messaging, etcetera. And that is because
it's really the most mature part of our product. Gmail's been around for six plus years as
a product. And typically they've gotten kind of organic adoption of our Docs and our sites
products, but it's not really been the focus. Those have been far less mature. So we're
actually excited today to announce that we are doing some fairly radical upgrades of
our Docs products right now, and to go into some depth on this, I'm gonna bring on stage
Anil Sabharwal, who's the product manager for Google Docs. [pause]
>> SABHARWAL: Thanks, Dave. How many of you have purchased licenses in Microsoft Office
for your business? And how many of you are still deciding whether to upgrade to Office
2010? Great. Well, with today's announcement, I'm excited to let you know that you now have
a choice. Now, I'm not saying you're gonna stop writing those big checks to our friends
at Microsoft. That's completely up to you. But what I am saying is when they come knocking,
saying that you need to upgrade to Office 2010, you should know that you now have a
choice, a viable replacement for the vast majority of your users that'll provide all
the benefits of the upgrade at a fraction of the cost, and improve productivity for
your business. That choice is Google Docs, with a brand-new platform built for better
collaboration and future innovation. For those of you who create, share, and collaborate
on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets on any computer anywhere in the world. And
today we're announcing new editors for Google Documents and Google Spreadsheets. Built from
the ground up with a brand-new architecture, these editors take advantage of faster rendering
engines in modern browsers, as well as new web standards such as HTML 5. And that means
powerful new features that were never possible in the browser before, like better document
layout and formatting tools, as well as the formula editing bar, auto complete, and drag
and drop columns and spread sheets, all making it easier for your users to move to the web.
We're also making the transition smoother by significantly improving document import
fidelity, and that means you can move all of your Microsoft Office files to the cloud
with confidence. And they're fast. Clients saw web applications that feel and run as
fast as client-side applications. And that means you can focus on the things that are
important to your business, like better collaboration, the heart of the modern workplace. You don't
have to keep sending attachments back and forth, managing different revisions and edits
that you have to merge. With Google Docs, everyone works with the same file in real-time,
so it doesn't matter if you're starting with a new file in the cloud, or you're working
with one on your desktop. Working as a team in Docs is like having a simple conversation.
And today we're announcing real-time character by character collaboration within Google Documents.
You can have up to 50 people collaborating on a spreadsheet at the same time. We're also
excited to announce a new, stand-alone editor for Google Drawings. That means you can create
and collaborate in real- time on drawings, schematics, organizational charts, flow charts,
and any other type of diagrams. So brand new architecture, faster collabora-- better collaboration,
faster performance, better import fidelity, and new features make Google Docs a platform
that can help your business be more productive than ever. Now, we're also gonna be providing
very shortly client-side tools that will let you share and collaborate on Office files
using the Google cloud. So all I can say, ladies and gentlemen, is that you now have
a choice. Thanks, Dave. >> GIROUARD: All righty. Thanks, Anil. [pause]
I think if there's anything we can all agree on, choice is good, okay? We hope you choose
us, but choice is good. That's great. We are gonna push forward *** our apps, on our
platform, on our devices, so you can expect to see a lot from Google quite regularly as
well, and we're actually very excited about this kind of redo of the Docs architecture,
because not only is it making the products a lot better right here, right now, but it's
actually gonna allow us to do a lot more quickly over the next year. So this is not by any
means the end. This is really the beginning, we think, of a period of acceleration around
our collaborative products. I have one more last thing before I turn it over, and that
is really on the mobile side. So, with apologies to those on the webcast, we have something
very special for you today, which is our Nexus One phone. And I believe these are unlocked,
GSM, AT&T-compatible, 3G-compatible phones. So I appreciate that some of you actually
can't take these or receive these. We intend them really as a way for you to evaluate and
use the technology, but we certainly appreciate some of you may have policies against such
a thing. But for those who don't and can make great use of this, you actually have on your
badge with your name on it a tear-off. You don't have to run out the room now. We've
got plenty of 'em. [pause] But during a break or during lunch, any time during the day where
you signed in, where you registered, you're gonna have a chance to get your own Nexus
One, as a show of appreciation for your spending your time with us today. [pause] With that,
was a brief introduction to some of the concepts, you're gonna see a lot more--what we're gonna
show today in terms of our products and our road map, and what we're doing with Chrome
OS and Android and the apps themselves, but that was just an overall introduction, so
I want to say thank you. I hope this is a great day for you, and I look forward to talking
with many of you. Thank you.