Infectious Greed posted on Google's business efforts and intentions towards penetrating the enterprise space - Infectious Greed: Google's Enterprise Strategy: Business as Loss Leader?.
Paul Kedrosky ends the post with "Fascinating. Who would have thought that selling software into enterprises could one day become a loss-leader for a technology company's consumer strategy?". After reading the post and the article I could not understand how Google's enterprise efforts will help them achieve better results on the consumer frontier and how does it play as a loss-leader.
I think that Google tries to enter the enterprise space with minimal efforts (They have very large competitive frontiers in consumers advertising, search and portal arenas) to achieve certain concrete goals regardless whether they reveal their strategy or not:
1) Create a contender for Microsoft's competitive edge in the personal information search space, where Microsoft has "strong" grasp (They own the enterprise OS and the documents platform). This may be a real intention to complement Google's offering or just to "divert" Microsofts focus for a while. Microsoft on their end will be able soon, after integrating and deploying personal search tool into their platform, to offer a better enterprise search via MSN that will present local results as well. This is something that Google will need to deal with seriously.
2) Create an initial customer base for educating themselves on enterprise search needs for later upsell with an offering that will be a "serious" contender for current enterprise search vendors. I think that education will be achieved by them (1,000 customers is enough to learn from) while building a real leverage-able customer base is something that I don't believe is achievable until they will present an offering in the same level current expert enterprise search engine vendors offer. No matter how "mini" their prices will be.
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