Sunday Summary

The one draw back to creating a Sunday Summary posting is there is a Sunday in every week of the year. Yes it has been a few Sundays since I posted a Sunday summary. I apologize for the irregular Sunday summary posting.

If you have been following the site, however, you will note that while there has not been a weekly posting of Sunday Summary items, there have been regular and frequent other posts.

Apology aside, here is my Sunday Summary for week 16 of 2008:

My Google Alerts for the week totaled 34 items. The bulk of those items were related to the Salesforce integration of Google Apps as part of the Salesforce offering. NY Times writer Miguel Helft provided a good summary of that news in his article of April 14th. titled, “Google and Salesforce Join to Fight Microsoft”. The article clearly tries to imply the news is a Google vs. Microsoft event. While that may be a valid perspective, it is hardly the intent and focus of Google. Everyone wants to make the efforts of Google to extend their offering beyond search into a Google vs. Microsoft battle. That misdirected analysis aside, the NYTimes article does a good job of noting what the real benefit will be in the Google Apps integration,

“… Dave Girouard, Google’s vice president and general manager, said the integrated offering would bring users new functions.”

Unfortunately the NY Times was not the only rag attempting to make the Salesforce news into a Google vs. Microsoft story. Most of the Google alerts were along the same general “created news” scenario. Given the predominant misdirection in the coverage of the Salesforce announcement, It would have been easy to miss the real news, in selecting Google Apps to integrate with Salesforce Zoho was left out in the cold. Salesforce had been chatting with Zoho to integrate their applications offering into the Saleforce solution. Who knows why the Zoho solution got left behind but as reported by David A. Utter of WebProNews who was quoting Zoho CEO, Sridhar Vembu,

“”Salesforce spends nearly 8 times on sales/marketing as it spends on R&D. Sounds to me a text book definition of “business model bloat’,” said Vembu. “If you are a customer of Salesforce, it makes you feel really happy that the company spends 8x on selling to you as in writing the code, right?”

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu, after being granted a peek at Saleforce’s balance sheet, (paraphrased) “believes Saleforce and Google Apps offering is bound to fail.”

Monitoring the Google news for week 16 was a predominantly boring read of the same Salesforce news over and over throughout the week. It almost precluded one from noticing, if one happened to be lucky enough to be on the Google servers that were not impacted, that Google dropped their IMAP mail services with an unplanned outage.

Search Engine Land did not miss the IMAP services drop; in his realtime reporting of April 16th, Barry Schwartz did a good job of presenting the evidence of that Google was having service outage problems:

“It appears that Google is having major issues with their email server. … This seems to be a major issue, where hundreds of Gmail users can no longer use Gmail or their email on Google Apps…. “

Unlike the hyped news of the Google vs. Microsoft Salesforce announcement, Google Apps and hosted mail being down is indeed news! Perhaps week 17 will be more interesting or at least, hopefully, it will have fewer “like me” hype articles so I don’t have to read so many Google Alerts!