Broadband Advisor

As Sheth told me, these tools couldn't have been done when Google started a decade ago. Some companies tried pioneering the Application Service Provider market, but the scarcity of high speed data connections and the special software required on the clients doomed the efforts. Today, broadband service of some level (at least low-end DSL) passes about 90% of all households and small businesses. Even more important, the browser grew biceps and can carry much heavier loads.

For those who think "All Google All The Time" computing ends when you step away from your Internet connection, say hello to Google Gears. This fairly new system provides a way to run most of Google's Docs without being actively connected to Google.

Sheth understands some folks remain wary of putting their data in the cloud, but he promises to take good care of it. He won't say how many data centers Google has or where they are, but assures me every byte of Gmail and other data gets replicated inside the primary data center for that user, and to other data centers as well. And security protections are the first part of building a new application, not the last add-on like for some developers.

Could a small company do all its computing using Google, including word processing, spreadsheets, accounting, databases, project management, etc.? Google folks say they have multiple case studies of companies using Google Apps and other services for the majority of their technology needs. Throw in accessing the Internet through the new Google Chrome browser, and you could say that any Software-as-a-Service offering was "reached" through Google. In that case, you could say Google met all your computing needs.

Is that really a good idea, sitting at your desktop and not seeing a character display on your screen until it went hundreds of miles away to a Google data center and back? After all, the keyboard interrupt channel to a central processor and video display adapter is much faster.

Now take that example and consider a young hotshot out with a smart phone, accessing programs, reading data, making minor changes, and coordinating with other young hotshots. The keyboard interrupt channel can't do that, but Google can. And Google is doing it for more than 10 million of your fellow small business workers.