The Googlization of Everything is a phrase developed by Siva Vaidhyanathan, who is a professor at the University of Virginia, and will soon be the topic of a book (I am also hoping by mentioning UVA that this may increase the chances of admission for my daughter).
I like the phrase because it reflects how Google has totally transformed the way we use and think about information. Yes, I know there are other search engines out there. But I don't care. When a company name becomes an everyday verb or noun to describe what that company does, it has done something very fundamental.
Google has transformed three fundamental assumptions about information management that affect the ECM industry.
- Ease of use. The simple search box has become the central metaphor for how difficult we think it ought to be to find information, regardless of whether we are in the consumer world or behind the firewall. This has changed the expectations of how we expect ECM solutions to work and how difficult they are to learn.
- Most everything they do is free. How many of us, if we were starting over, would put in an e-mail server? Maybe large organizations would, but I can tell you that almost no one I know who runs an organization like mine would bother.
- They have changed how we think about the "cloud." Google has changed the nature of how we think about applications and how we think about where we store the information created by those applications. Sure, there are all sorts of security and retention and reliability issues to consider. But as John Newton has pointed out in his blog Content Log, a potential long-term cost differential of 100X will have massive and unpredictable impacts on the ECM industry.
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