Microsoft should fear Google, take 2

Two months ago, I wrote an essay on why I thought GMail could seriously impact Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange business by bundling a (so far non-existent) calendar and Gmail into their search appliance.

I had another idea for how the Google bundle could be superior to Outlook/Exchange.

Gmail -- in its current Web service incarnation -- has ads along the side of the pages. Presumably, a corporation would get annoyed if they paid good money for a network appliance and they still had to look at ads. So the appliance version of Gmail should lose the ads.... or should they?

Google is good at figuring out which text items are related to which other text items. So what if they (automatically) figured out what things inside your company were related to which other things at your company and displayed them?

Scenario: You get an email message from your colleague David Jones about purchasing floss recyclamators for the Cobra project. When you read the message, you see various links in the sidebar:

• David Jones' home page
• the Cobra project home page
• a page listing your company's approved floss recyclamator vendors
• a page on this week's cafeteria menu
• Mabel Garcia's home page

David's page, the Cobra page, and the vendors page all make sense to you. (The cafeteria menu is odd, but you shrug it off. Even Google makes mistakes.) But you've never heard of this Mabel Garcia person and have no idea why she showed up on your list. You click on her home page, and you find that she's a new hire, and her resume shows that she spent ten years working at Floss Recycling Incorporated. Hot diggity! You can sure use some of her expertise!

If Google could do that, I could imagine people abandoning Outlook/Exchange in droves.

Ducky Sherwood