1 million companies have signed up for free Web tools
“We’re building fundamentally new tools." Google Apps program manager Rishi Chandra
google fun facts
• The conference rooms on the main campus of the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., are laid out geographically and named after cities around the world. Other Google offices have named their conference rooms after things that are important to that location. For example, in New York and London they’re named after local landmarks. In Chicago and Boston they’re named after local movies.
• The Gmail team, which currently resides in a building where rooms are named after Vietnamese cities, has a large wall of fan mail from Gmail users — sent in by snail mail.
• To foster innovation at Google, short articles that help spread knowledge are placed in the bathrooms. Engineering articles are called “Testing on the Toilet.” “Learning on the Loo” is the sales equivalent.
• Gmail video chat was developed by teams across the world using video chat itself.
After being laid off from Lehman Brothers last fall, Peter Ubriaco started his own company. But Ubriaco didn’t buy the usual office tools. He uses Google instead.
“Google products save me hundreds of dollars,” reports Ubriaco, 25.
Free is always popular, but in this economy, more people are turning to software such as Google’s. Google’s Gmail, launched in 2004, now boasts tens of millions of users. In 2006 Google turned applications (“apps”) like word processing, spreadsheets and calendars into Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Calendar.
There’s also Google Talk and the photo program Picasa. More than 10 million individual users and 1 million companies now have signed up for the Google Apps suite, about half of them outside the U.S. (companies can also choose a fancier, paid version of Google Apps). In the past year, the number of Google Docs users increased by 200 percent.
“Today you can start your own company from your living room at almost no expense,” says Louis Rosas-Guyon, author of the new book “Nearly Free IT.” “That’s why the recession has led to an explosion in entrepreneurship.”
Since Google’s “apps” are hosted on the Internet, they are accessible on any computer and don’t require software installation.
“Software should be just like electricity. You shouldn’t have to worry about it,” says Google Apps program manager Rishi Chandra. “We’re building fundamentally new tools.”
Google users can invite each other to work on the same document: no more multiple copies of the same document. “My business partner and I both work from home,” says real estate marketer Rod Holmes, who recently lost his job in Chicago and now runs his own business.
“We can work on the same documents at the same time while text chatting or video chatting with each other.”
And what about Googlers themselves? Instead of pens and pads, employees at the Googleplex in Mountain View carry laptops equipped with Google Apps as they move between the buildings.
“We create products based on Googlers’ needs,” says Google Calendar Manager Ken Norton.
“We use our own products, so if they’re useful to us we believe they’ll be useful to others.”
