Ok. You’ve got me – I’m a Google fan. I believe in Google, I think they are better than sliced bread. I even imported a grey Market Google phone the day they released it and switched my carrier to make it happen. Wow, this fanboy is declaring his love for Google on his corporate blog post. End of story right?
Unfortunately not, over the past few weeks Google has gone on a flury of announcements, product launches, and new corporate adventures. Let’s do a review:
1) Launching the Google Phone and attacking the consumer phone market with a new (for North America) direct sales model
2) Launching Google Buzz and attacking the social media market
3) Launching the new 1 Gigabit broadband internet project
So what’s my beef? I strongly believe that companies you can depend on and come to rely on in your daily operations and life need to keep their core focus. That is, good companies continue to concentrate on doing what they are good at. Losing your core focus to attack 3 of the most tumultuous markets – the Consumer Handset Market, the Social Media Sphere, and the Telecom Industry – seems like excessive risk. Why didn’t Google decide to focus on developing into these monsterous, barb ridden markets one at a time? Is their ambition bigger than their capability? Or are they naive with their newfound power and have already decided that they can take on any market?
So what’s the lesson? How does this relate to systems management?
Partnering with a solutions vendor for IT systems management that doesn’t have a core focus on the market is a mistake that I’ve seen played out time and time again. Practitioners get sucked into platforms designed by vendors who either have a vested interest in their own software stack, have a focus on markets that have nothing to do with the end user (MSP for instance), or are busy building functionality and features that just aren’t really related to managing the infrastructure but are more focused on vanity metrics.
A lack of focus also results in a fragmentation of the solution, as we see in many of the big 4 frameworks. Fragmentation is the careless tacking together and bolting together of 3rd party systems or intellectual property from acquisitions. This makes for very nice marketecture diagrams and collateral - but produces solutions that have clients scratching their heads 12 to 24 months after roll-out thinking “where did all my money go”?
Maybe Google is capable of attacking 3 massive markets at once and is capable of diverting their focus on multiple fronts, but IT systems management and monitoring vendors cannot.
When choosing a vendor, make sure you partner with a young agile company, that lives, breathes and does nothing but create a management solution that works. End of story.
Thanks Google, and good luck.
