5 ms·

Good ol’ core competency theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_competency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_competency Google’s mission is…well, that de

Good ol’ core competency theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_competency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_competency Google’s mission is…well, that depends on how cynical you are. But, whether it’s organizing the world’s information or spying on us with ads, it sure isn’t “develop boring payroll software, and maintain that awful boring software forever”. Also, without knowing the exact nitty gritty of what this particular bit of payroll software does: does it manage international employees? Because just doing US compliance would be bad enough, dealing with regulations for N countries sounds like eating a bucket of bees.

smt88 6y ago
Google, like its users, has no concept of their core competency. The only reasons I assume they'd skip building their own ERP are that it's a boring product and, if they tried to sell it, they'd actually have to support it.
- antonvs 6y ago
  Unless you squint hard enough count their cloud services, Google has zero demonstrated competency building enterprise apps. Their core competency may be a mystery, but we can rule out some things, and this is one.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    G Suite or whatever it's called today isn't "enterprise apps"? And their GCP is still third in the running and bigger than Oracle's and IBM's clouds, so that's gotta count for something.
    - antonvs 6y ago
      "Enterprise app" was perhaps too general. Neither of those examples remotely resemble an ERP application. Google has literally zero experience in that area, and if they tried to do it from scratch, it would take many years. Probably not less than ten years before they'd have a chance of competing with the established players. Even if they wholesale hired a team from a major player, it would still take years to reimplement the functionality and get it to a marketable state. There's no "minimum viable product" that could succeed in that space - a system has to be able to take care of an entire enterprise's operational needs, or it's not in the running.
      - candiodari 6y ago
        I disagree. Google could be extremely strong here. Both SAP and Oracle are essentially a database with a web- and UI framework and a few example apps. They are "dBase in the (locally-hosted) cloud", evolved 10 years. And yes, a few of the example apps delivered with the DBs are certified for certain financial purposes, which Google wouldn't have. But Google has quite a few parts of this already in place. Google has got the database, Spanner. It's even supposed to solve a major problem that both Oracle and SAP are currently lacking. Massively distributed transaction speed: if you want a webshop, but you're the 1000lb gorilla of your industry, you need to support tens to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. And you'd love to do this by just "BEGIN TRANSACTION <blabla> ... COMMIT", right? Well, mostly you can't do that. Oracle and SAP have always worked by providing faster single machine hardware and are not really ahead of Spanner in clustering. Let's assume Spanner marketing and academic papers actually tell us what Spanner can do. That it can run transactions, distributed, at greater speed than anything else. Apparently they can run transactions at "double the speed of light" (apparently they don't need a cluster roundtrip to confirm a transaction, just a one-way message). Hell, maybe they've got a patent on this technique. Second they HAVE one of the biggest business ventures of the planet running on this platform (Google Ads), and clearly working. So they have a strong argument that it can work very, very reliable. They've got all sorts of useful stuff integrated on top of this solution. BigQuery querying, you don't even need to configure or admin read-only replicas, those come free. Plus whatever Google cloud ML does, another area where Oracle and SAP probably can't ever match Google. Companies want this. If they can get the computational power of Google cloud behind their core database, it would have clear advantages. Oracle and SAP are both building this sort of solution, but that is not their strength. They can never approach the machine power Google has. So if Google built a dBase-like (hopefully a bit more modern) frontend on top of Spanner, make it accessible for administering huge businesses, and implement 100 example apps (warehouse management, basic (ie. ignoring the law) personnel administration, the hated hours tracking, ...) on top of Spanner, you have a solution that could be pretty tempting for huge businesses and would be a subscription based service that people seriously overpay for. The reason you need those 100 example apps is that they're not just 100 example apps. They're a standard data format (so for instance, any employee tracked in personnel admin doesn't need to be entered again in hours tracking. Warehouses and stock, administered by different apps, already have an interface between them sharing data, ...) They can compete here if they want, and while they're lacking one thing, they're very strong (some might say unbeatable) on another front. This can be made to work with not even that much effort. You are of course correct that it would take 10 years to build out this business, and that would be considered very fast. But it can be done.
nightowl_games 6y ago
Could play into GSuite. Could be a great play into workspace integration.
- OccamsMirror 6y ago
  I see zero evidence that Google cares about G̶S̶u̶i̶t̶e̶ Google Workspace.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Office365 has a gigantic advantage in this space with Dynamics ERP

smt88 6y ago

Google, like its users, has no concept of their core competency. The only reasons I assume they'd skip building their own ERP are that it's a boring product and, if they tried to sell it, they'd actually have to support it.

antonvs 6y ago
Unless you squint hard enough count their cloud services, Google has zero demonstrated competency building enterprise apps. Their core competency may be a mystery, but we can rule out some things, and this is one.
- sofixa 6y ago
  G Suite or whatever it's called today isn't "enterprise apps"? And their GCP is still third in the running and bigger than Oracle's and IBM's clouds, so that's gotta count for something.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    "Enterprise app" was perhaps too general. Neither of those examples remotely resemble an ERP application. Google has literally zero experience in that area, and if they tried to do it from scratch, it would take many years. Probably not less than ten years before they'd have a chance of competing with the established players. Even if they wholesale hired a team from a major player, it would still take years to reimplement the functionality and get it to a marketable state. There's no "minimum viable product" that could succeed in that space - a system has to be able to take care of an entire enterprise's operational needs, or it's not in the running.
    - candiodari 6y ago
      I disagree. Google could be extremely strong here. Both SAP and Oracle are essentially a database with a web- and UI framework and a few example apps. They are "dBase in the (locally-hosted) cloud", evolved 10 years. And yes, a few of the example apps delivered with the DBs are certified for certain financial purposes, which Google wouldn't have. But Google has quite a few parts of this already in place. Google has got the database, Spanner. It's even supposed to solve a major problem that both Oracle and SAP are currently lacking. Massively distributed transaction speed: if you want a webshop, but you're the 1000lb gorilla of your industry, you need to support tens to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. And you'd love to do this by just "BEGIN TRANSACTION <blabla> ... COMMIT", right? Well, mostly you can't do that. Oracle and SAP have always worked by providing faster single machine hardware and are not really ahead of Spanner in clustering. Let's assume Spanner marketing and academic papers actually tell us what Spanner can do. That it can run transactions, distributed, at greater speed than anything else. Apparently they can run transactions at "double the speed of light" (apparently they don't need a cluster roundtrip to confirm a transaction, just a one-way message). Hell, maybe they've got a patent on this technique. Second they HAVE one of the biggest business ventures of the planet running on this platform (Google Ads), and clearly working. So they have a strong argument that it can work very, very reliable. They've got all sorts of useful stuff integrated on top of this solution. BigQuery querying, you don't even need to configure or admin read-only replicas, those come free. Plus whatever Google cloud ML does, another area where Oracle and SAP probably can't ever match Google. Companies want this. If they can get the computational power of Google cloud behind their core database, it would have clear advantages. Oracle and SAP are both building this sort of solution, but that is not their strength. They can never approach the machine power Google has. So if Google built a dBase-like (hopefully a bit more modern) frontend on top of Spanner, make it accessible for administering huge businesses, and implement 100 example apps (warehouse management, basic (ie. ignoring the law) personnel administration, the hated hours tracking, ...) on top of Spanner, you have a solution that could be pretty tempting for huge businesses and would be a subscription based service that people seriously overpay for. The reason you need those 100 example apps is that they're not just 100 example apps. They're a standard data format (so for instance, any employee tracked in personnel admin doesn't need to be entered again in hours tracking. Warehouses and stock, administered by different apps, already have an interface between them sharing data, ...) They can compete here if they want, and while they're lacking one thing, they're very strong (some might say unbeatable) on another front. This can be made to work with not even that much effort. You are of course correct that it would take 10 years to build out this business, and that would be considered very fast. But it can be done.

nightowl_games 6y ago

Could play into GSuite. Could be a great play into workspace integration.

OccamsMirror 6y ago
I see zero evidence that Google cares about G̶S̶u̶i̶t̶e̶ Google Workspace.
rchaud 6y ago
Office365 has a gigantic advantage in this space with Dynamics ERP