"I am saying support staff is absolutely vital to succeed in the business software market. That is one of the reasons revenue/employee numbers are lower." Goog

"I am saying support staff is absolutely vital to succeed in the business software market. That is one of the reasons revenue/employee numbers are lower." Google does want to reap money from such low-margin, support-intensive "business software markets" too. But not directly. It enables 3rd parties to build such applications over it's platform (GAE). Such suites will soon show up to compete with the likes of Zoho/Salesforce/Intuit/SAP. A quote from "Fear the Right Things" section in http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html "What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don't know exist yet. They're way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they're cornered animals. Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn't relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there working on the same thing. That's the downside of it being easier to start a startup: more people are doing it." Google makes starting such startups easier and it becomes a mass market again, with apps competing against each other, running on its platform. Whoever wins/loses, Google ends up making better revenue.