Google Making Strides with Web Applications

Michael Lock bounded atop the small stage, peered out at 100 executives in the Fairmont Hotel ballroom in Dallas and proposed something radical.

Discard your company’s computer servers, he said, and store your productivity software and your records on the Internet.

The idea struck some folks as crazy when Mr. Lock pitched it Tuesday, but it’s catching on with a growing number of firms.

"It’s dramatically cheaper. It’s dramatically easier. And we’d argue that it’s also more secure," said Mr. Lock, director of North American sales for Google Enterprise.

Google still makes most of its money from search, but it also sells a growing number of programs to corporate customers.

Offerings include an e-mail system, calendar, word processor, spreadsheet and Web page creator.

Rather than buying the programs and installing them on their own computers, companies pay Google $50 per user per year and let Google store everything online.

The system requires that users have Internet access for even the simplest task, but it compensates by letting them collaborate easily.

Up to 50 people in 50 different parts of the world can work on the same file at the same time. The system shows changes in real time and eliminates the need for e-mailing documents back and forth.

Another advantage to moving everything online is scale.

A behemoth like Google pays far less for servers, storage and electricity than regular companies do.

"Size increases our efficiency by at least a factor of 10, and the gap is widening," Mr. Lock said.

For all the advantages of Web-based software, serious drawbacks remain.

The features available on desktop programs such as Microsoft Office dwarf the basic offerings that come with Google’s programs.

And many companies refuse to consider any software that prevents employees from working offline.

"Google may think there’s ubiquitous broadband, but a lot of companies don’t have it," said one audience member whose import-export company has often-unconnected offices in rural South America.

Many companies also worry about the security of Web-based applications, though such concerns appear to be receding as Google’s track record grows.

"We definitely had security concerns at first, but we actually feel more secure than we did before," said David Shapiro of Congressional Security Inc. in Grand Prairie.

"We always took computer security seriously, but we just don’t have the resources to secure our computers like Google."

As Google rolls out new products, it tries to make them work with popular formats. A Google Doc, for example, can generally be opened as a type of Word document without losing any formatting.

Many companies would like to see perfect compatibility with all Office formats, including the new file types that came with Office 2007.

Others are just waiting for Google to gain more acceptance.

"We do a lot of work with Fortune 500 companies and the U.S. government, so I’d be really hesitant to make any move until Google is fully accepted in industry," said Chris May, chief executive of I.E. Discovery in Austin.

"Google says it’s doing pilots at some very large companies. If I read that some of those companies go with Google, it will make me far more likely to switch," Mr. May said. "It’s important to see world-class companies embrace a product."

Even with some potential customers still taking a wait-and-see attitude, Google Enterprise signs up about 2,000 new businesses a day, most of them small companies. Competitors like Zoho and ThinkFree are also growing, and Adobe has just introduced a suite of Web-based productivity tools.

Even Microsoft, the reigning king of PC and server-based software, has been cautiously moving features online.

Observers such as Nicholas Carr believe the move from PC-based computing to Web-based computing will be one of the most important technology trends.

In his new book, The Big Switch, Mr. Carr wrote: "Cheap, utility-based computing will ultimately change society as much as cheap electricity did."