Is The Google Office Bamboozle Over?

In a May 23 post, I wrote:

...Google continues to give Microsoft fits with its bamboozle attack on Microsoft Office. This attack is intended to divert some Microsoft resources away from improving search to instead defend Office against the Google threat without taking significant Google resources and without generating much revenue. This is amplified in my book, Attacking The Crown Jewels, which also describes how a bamboozle attack may evolve:

"Bamboozle attacks can evolve into classic or proxy attacks. Sometimes the bamboozler discovers serious revenue potential in the attack weapon and decides to make a full commitment to the market, a classic attack. In other cases, the bamboozler sees an opportunity to spin off or sell the attack weapon to new owners that they are convinced they can influence to continue the attack for them as a proxy attack."

Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of this metamorphosis...at its shareholder's meeting earlier this month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the company now has a tag line: "Search, Ads and Apps." This is the first time the company has formally given applications equal billing with search and advertising.

I believe that yesterday's announcement of its acquisition of Postini marks the end of the Google Office Bamboozle. Postini is a serious, industrial strength provider of enterprise SaaS email and related data security solutions. This is the first grown-up in the Google Enterprise ecosystem. It gives Google the security chops it needs to earn credibility with businesses. Look for Postini to widen its scope to address the legal and operational concerns businesses have for securing and storing data, and look for this to be the back-end of Google Enterprise applications.

The secure data store was the missing piece of the puzzle.

But I come not to mourn the passing of the Google Office Bamboozle, but to honor it for giving us so much pleasure. And, as noted yesterday, those scampy Googlers have replaced it with their eBay Bamboozle, lest we turn our attention elsewhere.

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

Technorati: Business Strategy, Strategic Planning, Google, Postini