From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 53

(Clark 2012b). Reassurances aside, breakdowns lead users to worry that
they are not keeping a close enough eye on their own data. Indeed, one
of the key challenges for companies like Amazon and Google is to bal-
ance the costs of meeting worried companies' demands for geographical
proximity to data, even as they make use of a global network of data
centers to ensure suficient network redundancy to support their claims
of protection against outages.
Like its rival giants in the industry, Google is comfortable moving into
new territory, in this case the business applications market, long dominated
by Microsoft. Indeed Google has been so committed to innovative product
development that it has been dubbed the General Electric of the twenty-
irst century (Gapper 2013b). For years, Google Apps was pitched mainly
to small irms and start-ups because Microsoft dominated the market for
large businesses. But Google has begun to cut into this lucrative segment
with major private-sector clients like the pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-
La Roche, where 80,000 employees use the package, and public-sector
clients such as the U.S. Department of the Interior, where 90,000 use
Google Apps as their staple business-productivity software. Borrowing a
page from Amazon's playbook, Google relies on consistent low pricing
that Microsoft has dificulty matching (Hardy 2012b). Microsoft ights
back, but does not appear to take Google very seriously as a contender in
this market. Some might consider this a mistake, but Microsoft is clear
that Google is not a threat in the business cloud market because, accord-
ing to the general manager of Microsoft's business division, Google “has
not yet shown they are truly serious” about enterprise applications. “From
the outside, they are an advertising company” (Kerr 2012). There is some
substance to this view. After all, in 2011 only 4 percent of Google revenue
came from its business services, whereas 96 percent came from advertising.
Microsoft's cloud-based Ofice 365 is intended to keep Google's business
market share from growing, but Microsoft has yet to demonstrate wide-
spread uptake of the service because businesses, worried about security
and outages, still prefer Microsoft's more familiar Ofice software (ibid.).
Early in 2013 Google accelerated a push to challenge Amazon and Micro-
soft in cloud services. It doubled the size of its ofice space in the Seattle
area, near the headquarters of both rivals, and began large-scale hiring
of cloud-computing experts. In addition to opening another in the many
revenue streams that Google enjoys, the company expects it will have