Predictions for 2009

Each year, the blogosphere is flooded with predictions for the next. It’s time to look into 2009 for one of the most exciting, and unpredictable, companies in existence — Google.

Google Apps will continue to gain momentum in the Enterprise
The longer the economy stays bad, the more attractive Google Apps begins to look for businesses that currently license Microsoft products. It costs an incredible amount of money to legally run things like Microsoft Exchange and Office in-house. Google’s Enterprise business will grow at Microsoft’s expense this coming year.

Google Chrome makes deal with OEM’s, and snags a significant chunk of the browser market
It would be almost impossible for Google to dethrone Internet Explorer in 2009 (or even Firefox for that matter). Google will, however, make a deal with OEM’s to have Google Chrome installed, and set as the “default” browser on new computers. If this happens, it will have a significant impact on Chrome usage in 2009. We could see Google snag as much as 10 to 15 percent of the browser market in the coming year.

GOOG will gain some of the ground it lost on wall street
Overall, this was a terrible year for Google — just as it was with almost every other company because of the economy. As investors become more comfortable with Google’s dominant position, and the need for companies to keep their online marketing budgets relatively static, the share price should close in the green for 2009 (but of course, if I could accurately predict this type of thing, I’d probably be on a beach somewhere, so take it with a grain of salt).

Google Apps, Why use it?
The price is free, but no offline availability

The free suite of online applications from Google offers an alternative to the Microsoft universe and its Office productivity suite.
Adding some computers to the small business workplace entails making them useful for employees, while keeping the time to get people up to speed on them to a minimum. Google Apps may be helpful here.
In one swoop, a small business can add email, voice/text chat, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and a calendar to the enterprise. All for free, with support options and extra tools available for an annual per-user rate.
As long as the Internet connection stays up, Google Apps fulfills its role for computer users. What Google has not done is make an offline version of the service that would suit the roles of mobile workers like salespeople.
Help for that should be coming soon. "It's something we're actively working on solving," Google's Matt Glotzbach said in USA Today.
The short learning curve for Google Apps should please its adopters. For those looking for a richer feature set in a free set of productivity applications, small business people can choose traditional offline suites like OpenOffice or the relaunched Lotus Symphony for document needs.

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