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Zeichick's Take: Get ready for Google 1-2-3


By Alan Zeichick
May 29, 2008 — 
Get your antacid ready: Google has joined the cloud-computing revolution, and their combination of popular appeal and easy-to-use APIs is going to bring on one bad case of high-tech heartburn.

Think back to Lotus 1-2-3. No, go back a little further to VisiCalc. The spreadsheet was the killer application for business managers (who still had secretaries to type their memos) because they let executives play with what-if scenarios. VisiCalc was great, but it was limited to simple functions and equations in its cells.

The Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet came out in 1983 and totally eclipsed VisiCalc, Multiplan and other early competitors. One reason was because Lotus did great marketing. But the other reason was because 1-2-3 allowed macros—simple programs that managers could write themselves. Those macros and spreadsheets evolved in complexity, until one day, it didn’t work right. At that point, the executive called the IT department and said, in effect, “Can you support my spreadsheet business model? It’s critical for the business.” And IT had to figure it out.

Fast-forward to 2008 and look inside the typical mid-sized or large business. Your team has an idea for a quick-and-dirty Web application that can solve a problem. Should you go to IT and get some server space? Naw, that’ll take too long. Let’s look instead for a Web host.

Should you use Salesforce.com? Too complicated. Amazon? Too complex. How about the new Google AppEngine? It’s easy to write the code, and it’s all based on familiar platforms like the Apache Web server and MySQL database. Best of all, it’s free for up to about 5 million pageviews per month.

So, the skunk works development team builds and deploys the application, and before you know it, it’s business-critical. Guess who has to maintain it? Your development team, who discovers that it’s storing customer data without meeting corporate privacy guidelines, there’s no backup/recovery option, and the home-grown code does a lousy job of guarding against SQL injection attacks.

Note that there’s nothing special here about Google—departments can and do go around their IT organizations all the time. However, Google’s sheer market power and popularity are going to prove incredibly seductive.

What can you do to fight it? You can pass policies against it, I suppose, and then spend all your time attempting to enforce them. Or you can embrace change and the democratization of software development. Promote the use of Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce’s Force system within your entire company, not just IT. Become part of the solution, teach best practices, have awareness as to what’s going on.

It won’t be easy, and in fact may encounter resistance from the executive suite or even from within the IT hierarchy. Think long-term, though. Which is better for your company: Embracing change, or buying a lifetime supply of antacids?

Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.


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