Most computer industry companies would feel satisfied with ruling the highly lucrative and technically complex search engine advertising market -- but not Google.

As the search giant celebrates its 10th anniversary of incorporation this month, riding a years-long bonanza from its search business, it is also a scrappy underdog with lofty aspirations in the world of software for workplaces.

As such, Google, the unmatched consumer search engine champion, must compete against seasoned and formidable IT providers like Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. This is no small undertaking, requiring a long-term commitment and heavy investments, while facing real risks.

The jury is still out on whether it's wise for Google to invest significant resources in providing software for enterprise search, office productivity, mapping, collaboration and communication.

It's estimated that about 98 percent of the company's revenue comes from consumer search advertising, making the company's Enterprise unit a small side business currently, at least from a dollar perspective.

Industry observers recommend that IT and business managers keep this in mind as a risk factor when considering buying enterprise products from Google.

Although Google maintains it is committed long term to its enterprise products, it isn't unheard of for large companies to change course and pull out of non-core businesses with little advanced notice.

The warning should be heeded particularly by CIOs in large companies contemplating a major investment in products such as the Google Apps Premier hosted communication and collaboration suite.

"I would absolutely ask that question," said Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz. "As long as 98 percent of Google's revenue comes from other sources, this question of whether they're in [enterprise software] for the long term will always come up. This isn't their core business."

Burton Group analyst Guy Creese concurs. "In its heart of hearts, Google wants to succeed as a provider of software to large enterprises, but they haven't yet signaled that it's a do-or-die kind of thing," Creese said.

The highest-profile product in Google's Enterprise unit is Apps, whose free versions have proven very popular with individuals, small and medium-size businesses and educational institutions.

Google could have opted to just target universities and SMBs with the Standard and Education editions of Apps, generating revenue from advertising. It could also have been content to lure SMBs to the Premier version, which is a very affordable option at $50 per user per year, when compared to Microsoft Office and Exchange.

"The things preventing Google from being attractive to enterprises aren't necessarily big issues for SMBs," Creese said.

Google could rake in robust revenue from SMBs, which are often underserved by major vendors and hold off on purchasing IT products that they need but aren't priced right for them, Koplowitz said. "There's a lot of money to be made there," he said.

This accounts for much of the success Google has had with its Search Appliance and Google Mini, which have disrupted the enterprise search market, where systems have traditionally been pricey and complicated to install, manage, and use. Priced aggressively and built with a low-maintenance, plug-and-play design, those products have hit a sweet spot with SMBs and schools.

The University of Florida in Gainsville has been using the Search Appliance since 2002 and currently has two of them to index its entire public Web presence -- from its main site to individual college and department sites and Web servers from specific research teams.

"The appliance has always been easy to set up and maintain. The administrative interface gives a very clear overview of how the appliance sees your Web sites, and makes it easy to update the index," said Daniel Westermann-Clark, Web developer at the university.

According to Google, more than 500,000 organizations have signed up for Google Apps, totaling more than 10 million end users, of which "hundreds of thousands" are using Premier.

However, Google has made it clear it has its sights set on large companies as well, recently releasing a newly architected version of the Search Appliance that can index more than three times as many documents as the current model and improves the product's IT management functions.

But it's the Apps Premier expectations that are riding particularly high. As CIOs warm up to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) approach of application delivery as an option to the traditional on-premise model, Google sees a big opportunity to take business away from Microsoft's Office/Exchange and from IBM's Notes/Domino and rake in big bucks.

In fact, a big motivation behind Google's development of Chrome, a major two-year project involving significant investment, was to create a browser optimized for next-generation Web applications like the ones in Apps Premier.

Google is far from alone, as Yahoo's Zimbra, Cisco's WebEx, Zoho, and others beef up their own hosted collaboration and communication suites, while Microsoft and IBM are taking steps to protect their turf.

In its enterprise aspirations, Google has other disadvantages. Unlike Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce.com, Google doesn't have a large list of enterprise clients, nor does it have as much experience courting CIOs and catering to their requirements, including prompt, individual attention throughout a product's lifecycle.

While Google has strengthened Apps Premier's IT control features, particularly with its purchase of e-mail security and management expert Postini, the suite still lacks features that large enterprises often require. For example, Google only offers an uptime guarantee for Gmail, not for the other components, and the company admits that the feature set of its applications lags behind Office's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, while Apps' calendaring and contact management features are often cited as weak. Apps has only partial support for offline access to its applications, a popular request.

"Google hasn't been able to put together a set of features that are important enough to enterprises to make them shift," Creese says.

Thus, CIOs aren't rushing to adopt Apps Premier, and those who decide to deploy it are opting to do so for a limited set of users and for operations that aren't critical to the business. This is true even among CIOs who have embraced SaaS applications as viable alternatives to on-premise software.

Health-care company The Schumacher Group has used hosted applications successfully for well over two years from vendors such as Salesforce.com and Oracle's PeopleSoft, and is now about to deploy Apps Premier, but not as a replacement to its Exchange/Office environment, which its about 750 full-time employees use.

Instead, The Schumacher Group, which provides management services for hospital emergency rooms, plans to buy Apps Premier licenses for the about 2,400 physicians and nurses that it works with as independent contractors.

"We'll use Apps Premier to create an environment that doesn't exist now, but as far as replacing Exchange and Office, we're not at that level yet," said The Schumacher Group CIO Douglas Menefee.

Part of the problem is that Apps Premier can't meet the company's regulatory compliance requirements for handling patient data, Menefee said. However, it looks like a good option to provide e-mail, calendar and office collaboration software at a low cost and in a convenient hosted manner to these doctors and nurses, he said.

The decision to go with Apps Premier, as opposed to another hosted option, is 99 percent certain, barring any architectural problems that might prevent the users from accessing the software through the hospitals' networks. A pilot phase with portion of the doctors may start in about a month, he said.

And so as Google celebrates its 10th birthday and its unquestionable dominance of the search engine ad market, which has propelled it to stratospheric financial success, it looks at a major challenge and unanswered questions in enterprise software.

"It's hard to break into the enterprise business," Koplowitz said. "Will Google sign those big customers that represent big revenue and continued investment in this area? Google certainly can afford it, but that doesn't mean they won't decide to refocus their resources in their core business. That's definitely a fair question to ask of Google. I don't think Google is having cold feet yet but time will tell if they're in this for the long term."

First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, "crowdsourcing" describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few.

Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise -- it's talented, creative and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It's a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education and job history no longer matter, where the quality of work is all that counts and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product or solve the problem, you've got the job. But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent employed, research conducted and products made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable.

When the original article was published, crowdsourcing still constituted a nascent business model. A few small companies had achieved limited successes with it, and large companies had only begun to test the waters. In this excerpt, Howe argues that in just two years crowdsourcing has revolutionized an entire industry -- stock photography -- and may well be poised to create disruption in other fields as well.

- - -

Adapted from Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe.

More at Howe's Crowdsourcing Blog.

Chapter 7: The Canary in the Coal Mine

There's a story people like to tell about Bruce Livingstone. In late 2005, Getty Images, the world's largest photo agency, was looking to acquire Livingstone's company, iStockphoto, the world's most successful crowdsourcing company. Long before the contracts were drawn up, Livingstone, to show his commitment to the deal, tattooed the word "Getty" in cursive across the tender flesh on his inner wrist. Then he e-mailed Getty CEO Jonathan Klein photos of the tattoo under the message: "Don't make me write another word after this!" It's just the kind of tale -- emblematic of determination and just the right amount of quirky eccentricity -- that tends to burnish the reputation of its subject. In Livingstone's case, it has the added benefit of being demonstrably true.

With his penchant for muscle cars, rockabilly haircuts and, yes, tattoos, it's tempting to call Livingstone an unlikely CEO. But I prefer to think of Livingstone as a perfectly reasonable chief for some corporation from, say, the year 2020. A company not unlike iStockphoto. Located in a single, cavernous room inside a former factory in downtown Calgary (Alberta, Canada), iStockphoto houses a tiny fraction of its actual workforce. And Livingstone, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, occupies a desk -- chosen, it would seem, at random -- in the middle of the floor. The corner office clearly loses significance in a company that thrives on decentralization.

Jeff Howe explains crowdsourcing, which activates the transformative power of today's technology, liberating the latent potential within us all.

Westeel Rosco built the factory in 1925 to manufacture nails, screws and other bits of hardware. Unlike Westeel Rosco, iStock's products -- stock photos, illustrations and videos -- aren't manufactured on-site. They're created by a global, fluid workforce of 60,000 part-time photographers and artists, only a fraction of whom make a living from the work they sell on iStock. Yet they have a devotion to the company matched by few traditional firms. The full-time staffers who spend their days in the old Westeel Rosco plant play a support role for the community -- and community is the only applicable word -- that is making the product iStock brings to market every day. And that community has been very, very good to Livingstone and his investors. In the course of several years iStock has grown from a hobby to the third-largest purveyor of stock images in the world. When Getty purchased iStock in early 2006, Livingstone took home more than half of the $50 million Getty paid for the company.

The first stock photo agency was founded in 1920, and for most of the 20th century the industry was an afterthought, trafficking in the outtakes from commercial magazine assignments. Very few photographers tried to make a living off the market in preexisting images alone. This changed after the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s led to a rapid growth in the publishing industry, and to a commensurate demand for images. Suddenly photographers were making six figures a year selling photos they'd already been paid to shoot. It was like minting money. Stock photography is, in relative terms, a tiny industry. The annual global gross for the entire business is estimated to be around $2 billion, which makes it a bit bigger than the market for gift baskets, but a little smaller than the annual sales of orchids. But this little industry has undergone big changes, and could well be a case study in how the crowd will impact much larger businesses.

In just the last few years the influx of talented amateurs armed with inexpensive, high-resolution digital cameras has upended the economics of stock photography. Five years ago, a professional-quality image was still a scarce resource. No more. This isn't to say the market for high-end photographs has disappeared. A gifted photographer will always find work. But the professional no longer has a lock on the middle and lower ends of the stock photo business. With a modicum of training, just about anyone can take a decent shot. Sophisticated cameras and photo-editing software do the rest. iStock exploits this fact. Design firms and other small companies working on a budget quickly embraced what became known as the "microstock" model. One graphic designer told me he went from paying hundreds of dollars an image to less than $10. "I pass on some of the savings to my clients and keep the rest. We're both delighted."

iStock might be great for buyers, but it's caused all sorts of headaches for professional stock photographers. In my original Wired article about crowdsourcing I quoted a Los Angeles-based photographer, Mark Harmel, saying that this influx of cheap images had caused a slight decline in his income from stock photo sales, which had dropped to $60,000. But in the two years since that decline has fallen off a cliff, to $35,000 in 2007. "If I look at the trend line, it just keeps going down. I'm really concentrating on getting assignments now," says Harmel. "I recently came back from London with 70 really wonderful shots. I'll probably use them on my website, but it's not worth my time to bother submitting them to a stock agency. They won't sell."

Harmel's far from alone. In fact, Getty's other businesses have struggled in the crowdsourced era. In the year I spent writing this book the company's stock slid 60 percent, falling to just under $22 by February 2008. That month Getty was acquired by the private equity firm Hellman Friedman for $2.4 billion, a considerably lower figure than the company had originally sought. According to a report released at the time of the sale, Goldman Sachs estimates that Getty's core business -- the sale of rights-managed, professionally produced images -- will continue to suffer an irreversible decline, falling to just 29 percent of its revenues by 2012. In the same period the investment bank projects iStock to continue its rapid rate of growth. iStock sold $72 million worth of images in 2007, a figure expected to jump to $262 million by 2012.

In this light, paying $50 million for a crowdsourced photo company looks like the smartest decision Getty ever made. The company is in the midst of transforming its business, from one reliant exclusively on professionals to one that is at least equally reliant on amateurs. As the Goliath of the industry, where Getty goes its competitors are sure to follow, which is to say, stock photography itself has been utterly transformed through crowdsourcing, in which a once-scarce commodity has become abundant. The question to ask is whether the upheaval roiling stock photography is only a leading indicator, like the minor volcanic eruptions that can precede a catastrophic earthquake.

Already the trend is migrating to other fields. Most immediately, the same dynamics that made the stock photo ubiquitous -- affordable digital SLR cameras and burgeoning communities of enthusiastic amateurs -- are affecting other markets for visual images. So-called "citizen paparazzi" use cellphone cameras to snap impromptu shots of stars and then sell them to new photo agencies such as Scoopt, which specialize in buying up and marketing their work. Amateurs can beat professional paparazzi for the simple reason that they vastly outnumber them. It's a question of probability: The throng of pedestrians in Greenwich Village, for instance, have a much better chance of catching an unkempt Gwyneth Paltrow than a single paparazzo.

And photography may well be just the beginning. iStock itself is doing a burgeoning business in the sale of stock video footage, and the crowd is also making commercials, collaborating on TV scripts, and recording and distributing their own music. They're writing political analysis, creating their own video games, and making feature-length movies. For the time being, all this activity has taken place in something of a parallel universe, without causing any of the economic upheaval visited on the stock photo or pornography industries. But those universes are beginning to collide as more companies attempt to package all this outpouring of creativity into a marketable product.

While crowdsourcing has already emerged as a potent force in the media and entertainment industries, it's also profoundly influenced the way even Fortune 100 companies like Procter & Gamble do business. Once famous for its insular culture, Procter & Gamble now crowdsources much of its R&D process, using global networks of scientists such as InnoCentive and NineSigma, which boast a combined membership of 2 million professional and amateur researchers. Even companies operating in a conventional field such as mining have found crowdsourcing applications. The Canadian gold-mining group Goldcorp put geological survey data online and offered a $575,000 prize to anyone who could identify likely areas for exploration. Goldcorp says the contest produced 110 targets that yielded $3 billion in gold. Following its lead, the mining giant Barrick Gold Corporation recently offered $10 million to anyone who could improve its silver-extraction process. The open call of crowdsourcing is also being used by companies such as Google (to develop applications for its Android mobile platform) and Netflix (to improve its recommendation system). The question is whether the iStock secret sauce can be applied to industries like television and journalism and, possibly, even beyond to any business that traffics in bits and bytes. To answer that question, it helps to know what's in the secret sauce.

The Community Is the Company

iStock has been compared to a cult, and the analogy isn't entirely unfair. It's no accident that the most successful companies in the web's second coming -- most of whom traffic in the crowd's creative output -- are led by outsize personalities. "Bruce is to iStock what Tom is to MySpace," notes Garth Johnson, iStock's VP of Business Development. (Johnson resigned his position after this book went to press.) For those readers over the age of 30, Tom is Tom Anderson, the president of the social networking behemoth MySpace and the first "friend" to greet any new user. Under this new archetype of a company -- in which the community, as much as the customer, comes first -- the cult of personality plays a crucial role in community building, and Livingstone has been as essential to the growth of the iStock community as Anderson has been to MySpace's. "Bruce has a really strong, extremely charismatic personality online," says Johnson. "And that's really helped us build the community."

It's safe to say that iStock has left the community-building phase behind: Sixty-thousand people have combined to create an enormous portfolio of over 3.5 million images and 100,000 videos. By contrast, Getty's other divisions combined only use 2,500 photographers. The iStockers offer the company their artwork, and in return iStock goes to extraordinary lengths to keep the iStockers happy. The site offers the budding photographer all manner of free tutorials, and the forums buzz -- at a rate of 38 posts per minute -- with questions about lens sizes, polarized filters and F-stop settings. iStock doesn't offer a chance to get rich. It offers the chance to make friends and become a better photographer.

"We don't own anything, the community does" says Johnson. "Everything we do affects these people, whether they're just earning enough to pay for their equipment, or they're making mortgage payments from their photo sales. They all want a voice, and we have to give it to them, because really, the community is the company."

The upside to this state of affairs should be obvious -- a dedicated, efficient workforce with no expectation of receiving a living wage -- but there are downsides as well: Even the smallest changes can roil the fickle, passionate community of iStockers. In March 2006, iStock launched a new feature on its web forums, a "forometer" which measured an iStocker's popularity through "bafflingly complex scientific methods" including the date and number of posts to the forum. The forometer displayed its results through a set of red, yellow or green bars. It did not go over well. The community questioned the principles behind the feature, as well as its functionality. Not long after its launch, the feature had been removed. Employees may be hell on overhead, but they're paid to accept all but the most draconian policies with a polite nod. Communities, on the other hand, aren't paid to stick around, and nothing stops them from selling their photos to one of iStock's many competitors. "They don't work for us," Livingstone laughs. "We work for them." If the iStocker feels a sense of ownership over the site, that's understandable: The iStock community predates iStock the company.

Livingstone didn't set out to revolutionize an industry, he just wanted to fill a personal need and help a few friends at the same time. In 2000 Livingstone was running a small graphic design and web-hosting firm in Calgary. Bruce is an avid photographer himself, and over the years he had developed an extensive network of photographers and designers. Early in the year he took 2,000 of his images and put them online. Anyone could download his photos in exchange for giving him an e-mail address. Livingstone's friends decided they wanted to share their images with the public, too. That June the budding community instituted a credit system: A user could download one image for every image of theirs that had been downloaded by someone else.

It was a classic example of the gift economy, the non-monetary exchange that grew up alongside the internet. During iStock's early years, everyone took something and gave something in turn. "The feeders and the eaters were the same people," as Livingstone puts it. Everyone profited by acquiring new images, though no one made (or spent) a dime. Soon friends of friends heard about Bruce's nifty idea and started uploading their images, too. Then around 2002 a wider public got wind of iStock, and the site began to hit critical mass. Soon Livingstone was paying $10,000 a month for the bandwidth to support it. He could have taken advertising to cover the cost of hosting, but he felt that would violate the spirit of the site. "The focus was on the community, and good design. Advertising would have cluttered the site," says Livingstone.

Instead, he started charging a quarter for each image, and he opened the system up to the public. This proved to be a momentous decision. Word quickly spread among publishers that there was a site offering cheap, usable images, and photographers began flocking to iStock to upload their portfolios. Traffic to the site skyrocketed, and soon Livingstone raised the price to $1 per image. "I thought it might become a sideline business," he says. It quickly became much more than that. The quality of the images wasn't always as high (or as consistent) as a traditional stock agency's, but the differences were indiscernible to the general consumer, and after all, you couldn't beat the price. By 2004 a host of other so-called "micro-stocks" had sprung up with strategies similar to iStock's. The professionals panicked. Microstock photos, they charged, were flooding the market with subpar images. At first, the industry aligned itself against iStockphoto and other microstock agencies such as ShutterStock and Dreamstime.

Then in early 2006, Getty announced it would buy iStockphoto for $50 million. "If someone's going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses," Getty CEO Jonathan Klein told me shortly after the sale. Smaller magazines, nonprofit organizations, and all manner of websites have continued to flock to iStock's high-volume, low-cost model. As of February 2008, iStockphoto had 2 million regular customers purchasing photographs, video footage, illustrations and animations. "Bruce's brilliance," Jonathan Klein once told me, "is that he turned community into commerce." Livingstone uses a slightly different formulation: "I turned commerce into community,"

iStockphoto has perfected the Jedi Mind Trick that's at the heart of crowdsourcing. It's an incredibly cost-effective strategy -- iStock boasts a 55 percent profit margin. And yet, Livingstone stumbled into this business model by creating a context -- a community of like-minded enthusiasts -- in which financial measures take a backseat to considerably less tangible concerns. Ask someone in the office, and they'll tell you: It's not about the money. Ask an iStocker and they'll tell you the same thing. In fact -- would-be crowdsources take note: If it is about the money, it won't work. It will fizzle, not sizzle, as one of iStock's designers put it. "What's funny is, the money people, they pretty quickly get pulled aside in the forums by the core people. Or they just don't have a voice. People will ignore them, like 'Oh, that's just so and so, they're just here to make money.'"

That doesn't mean the iStockers are unmotivated by self-interest. The more a photographer's images are downloaded, the more recognition they receive in the community, and the more credits they earn to download other people's photos to use in their own designs. And the additional income is also welcome, of course. Unlike other cases in which large corporations have attempted to monetize community, iStock does reward its contributors. It paid out $21 million in 2007. It's significant that people in online communities like iStock's react with great hostility to the idea that crowdsourcing is a form of cheap labor -- despite the fact it demonstrably is. After all, no one wants to feel exploited. In the end, what iStock provides is an invaluable if impossible-to-measure currency: meaning. The crowd will give away their time -- their excess capacity -- enthusiastically, but not for free. It has to be a meaningful exchange.

Adobe Systems in October plans to launch a private pilot program for its "Genesis" mashup technology, which provides a desktop client uniting multiple tasks in a single workspace.

The pilot project will provide Genesis to selected customers and partners, with 100 to 200 people set to test it, said Matthias Zeller, group product manager for corporate development at Adobe, in an interview at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Friday. A more widespread beta program is eyed for some point in the future.

With Genesis, Adobe is aiming to save users from having to open up multiple windows to access various applications; Genesis, which is just a code name, provides a unified user experience for each specific project. Serving as an alternative to portals, Genesis offers business users links to enterprise applications, business intelligence, documents, and Web applications. Content can be shared with other users. Instant messaging, VoIP, and video collaboration are supported as well.

"It's a mashup on the client," Zeller said. Users can make a "mini-portals on the desktop," he said.

Genesis is built with Adobe's Flex technology and deployed on the desktop via Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Supported on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, the client is developed with Flex and compiles into Adobe's Flash software.

Users, for example, could bring together a Salesforce.com application with PowerPoint materials and Google searches. "Today, you do all that separately," requiring many windows, said Zeller.

"The idea in Genesis is bring all these windows into a workspace, which is persistent on your desktop," he said. The desktop leverages drag-and-drop capabilities. The Genesis user experience takes cues from products such as Adobe Photoshop Express for assembling content.

Also featured in Genesis is the notion of content catalogs, to be provided by enterprise users themselves or Adobe partners. The company plans to work with other vendors to develop these catalogs. Adobe already is working with Business Objects regarding development of BI dashboards.

"The whole concept of Genesis relies on an ecosystem of partners and end-users to provide content for it," Zeller said.

Adobe has not set precise product release plans for Genesis. But plans call for users to access the client for free and subscribe to Adobe's Acrobat.com hosted service to handle collaboration.

The disk storage industry defied economic gloom in the second quarter with strong increases in both capacity sold and revenue, according to two research companies.

Worldwide revenue from external disk storage systems grew 16.7 percent in the quarter, the fastest year-over-year increase that market has seen in two years, IDC said on Friday. Meanwhile, total disk storage systems revenue grew 10.9 percent, according to IDC. Vendors shipped 1,777 petabytes of capacity in total, up 43.7 percent from a year earlier.

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Sales growth was remarkable especially because it occurred across several market segments, IDC said in a news release.

Despite economic slowdowns in some parts of the world, storage demand has been growing rapidly, driven in part by increased use of video and by regulations that force enterprises to preserve more data. IDC has estimated overall demand for storage capacity is growing by about 60 percent per year.

IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements associated with three or more disks. Some are located inside server cabinets and some are external. While the total disk storage system market hit $6.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter, the external market grew to $5.08 billion.

EMC kept its lead in external disk storage systems with 21.7 percent of the market, followed by IBM and Hewlett-Packard in a statistical tie with 13.1 percent and 12.9 percent, respectively. EMC's revenue grew fastest among the major vendors, up 19.7 percent to $1.101 billion from $920 billion a year earlier. HP's growth rate was lowest, at 8.2 percent, and the company lost a full percentage point in market share.

In the total disk storage systems market, HP fared even worse with a 1.2 percent drop in revenue, while all other major vendors gained. Though HP remained in the lead, it fell to an 18.1 percent market share, nearly tied with IBM at 17.7 percent. EMC was in third place and Dell in fourth. Sun Microsystems had the strongest rise in revenue, at 29.2 percent. Its revenue grew to $494 million and its market share to 7.1 percent.

According to figures from research company Gartner, the external controller-based disk storage market grew 18.8 percent in the second quarter, reaching $4.46 billion in revenue. EMC lost half a percentage point of market share but maintained a commanding lead at 24.3 percent, experiencing 16 percent revenue growth in the quarter. Next was IBM with 14.1 percent of the market, followed by HP, Dell, and Hitachi Data Systems. NetApp came in sixth but had a strong 22.9 percent revenue gain, Gartner said.

Sun's revenue shot up 34.7 percent in the quarter, according to Gartner, which attributed the gain to its StorageTek 2000-, 6000-, and 9000-series products. The relative newcomer to storage, which entered the market through StorageTek and other acquisitions, had 6.6 percent of the market.

Gartner found the Japanese market leading in growth, with revenue up 38.7 percent from a year earlier, followed by Latin America with 25.2 percent. Europe, the Middle East and Africa had growth of 22.3 percent, and the Asia-Pacific region grew 16.6 percent. North America trailed all other regions with 12.7 percent growth, according to Gartner.

Microsoft Friday renamed the next major release of BizTalk server and committed to releasing major updates to the business process management server line ever two years or less.

Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in Microsoft's connected systems division, said the company changed the name of the name of the next version from BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to BizTalk Server 2009 to indicate that its a major release. The new version is slated to ship during the first half of next year, he added.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 was made generally available last September.

"[Users] want more transparency," Kawasaki said. "As they're doing more and more with our technology, they want to be able to plan for future releases. We're trying to provide much more transparency about where we're going with BizTalk."

Kawasaki went on to outline the major new features planned for the 2009 release and for the follow-on major release, now referred to as BizTalk Server 7.

The 2009 release, he said, will add support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, and the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 as well as bolstered connectivity and better developer productivity tools.

On the connectivity front, the server will include a new Web services registry, new business adapters, better host systems integration, and enhanced business activity monitoring, Microsoft said. It will also include improved support for EDI and AS2 protocols for business-to-business connectivity, Kawasaki added.

For developers, BizTalk 2009 adds support for Microsoft's Team Foundation Server and provides development teams with integrated source control, bug tracking, Project Server integration, and support for team development.

Microsoft plans to focus on developer productivity and visibility in BizTalk Server 7, Kawasaki added. For example, Microsoft hopes to provide an easier way to do automated mapping between systems and protocols to speed connectivity. Release 7 will also focus on asset management to support remote devices beyond RFID readers, he added.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google garnered headlines all week with its new Chrome browser. Rival Microsoft announced it will release just four patches next Tuesday, but that may not be cause to think the day will be an easy one for those responsible for keeping systems patched. On the virtualization front, HP launched a product-and-services blitz this week, while VMware picked up a Microsoft certification. Otherwise, a warning was issued about new trickery from spammers, and in case we all weren't aware of it by now, social-networking sites could be ripe for malware.

1. Continuing coverage: Google's Chrome browser: Google offered up a Labor Day holiday surprise when it inadvertently posted a look at its new Chrome browser at an unofficial company blog. Google then made the news official later in the day and released the browser, which shifts the landscape of that market, in beta on Tuesday. Reviewers found the Chrome browser fast, functional, and, following the Google home-page pattern, with a stripped-down look. By week's end, though, the first security problems had surfaced.

2. Upcoming Microsoft patch lineup could be 'massive,' says researcher: A word of warning for next week -- don't assume that because Microsoft is releasing only four patches this month that it will be a snap to deal with them. "It's not going to be an easy month, what with all these different applications and different operating systems affected. Patching will be a lot more involved than you'd think with just four bulletins," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. The job of applying the patches could be "potentially massive," he said.

3. Researchers build malicious Facebook application: A research team built a malicious Facebook program to show the perils of social-networking applications. Their experiment shows how easy it could be for a miscreant to trick a big group of users into downloading an application that seems harmless, but that contains malicious code.

4. Should IT form a union?: Demands on IT workers keep piling up, and they have to labor under the constant threat of having their jobs outsourced. Is it time for IT workers to unionize in order to demand better working conditions? Perhaps, but the idea could also be a tough sell in the "lone gunman" ethos of IT work.

5. Sony recalls 73,000 Vaio laptops due to burn hazard: Sony recalled 73,000 Vaio TZ laptops because a manufacturing defect could cause them to overheat in some circumstances. Wiring near the hinge of the computer models could short circuit, Sony said. One person has suffered a minor burn and Sony has gotten 15 additional reports about computers overheating.

6. Spammers use free Web services to shield links: Spammers are using free Web services to try to make the spam links they send out look more legitimate, according to MessageLabs. Photo-hosting sites and the like are being used by spammers who are taking advantages of various features offered as part of free services, the e-mail security vendor has found.

7. HP launches product blitz for virtualization: Responding to survey findings that show most businesses aren't making the most of what virtualization has to offer, HP introduced several new products aimed at both desktop and server virtualization. Besides the hardware, including a new ProLiant server and desktop thin clients, HP is alos offering virtualization consulting services.

8. VMware's ESX certified for Microsoft support, deployment: Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program has issued its first certification with VMware's ESX hypervisor receiving the honors. The certification means that VMware's product will work with Microsoft's Windows Server and other software. It also means that ESX users will be able to receive tech support from both companies.

9. Internet traffic growth slowing, research firm shows: Remember the alarming reports that the Internet is going to collapse under the weight of its own data, especially as more video goes online? Well ... for the second year in a row, international Internet capacity grew at a quicker pace than Internet traffic, according to TeleGeography. International Internet traffic grew 53 percent from the middle of last year to the middle of this year, compared to 61 percent in the prior year. Between 2007 and 2008, average traffic utilization levels on the Internet dropped to 29 percent from 31 percent, with peak utilization decreasing from 44 percent to 43 percent, the market-tracking firm found.

10. Cheaters: Inside the hidden world of IT certification fraud: A group of IT hardware and software vendors have joined with independent certifying agencies, test centers and some others to create the IT Certification Council in an effort to share information to keep certification fraud from occurring. Certification cheating is apparently a dirty little IT secret that the council seeks to bring into the open.

Can a business be run solely in the cloud without a server anywhere in sight? Appirio says it can and is already doing it.

Starting out with four people two years ago and growing to nearly 100 employees, the company relies on cloud-based, on-demand software from Google and Salesforce.com, said Narinder Singh, founder and chief marketing officer at Appirio. The company provides products and services to accelerate adoption of on-demand services.

"Today, our company continues to run its entire business in the cloud. There's no servers inside Appirio," Singh said during a presentation at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon.

The company uses Google Docs to collaborate on a day-to-day basis and Salesforce.com for such tasks as an employee recruitment system. Human resources, IT asset management, and financial systems also run in the cloud. Google Sites, providing secure Web sites, is used for collaborating with customers.

Annual IT costs per employee for hardware and software at Appirio are less than $1,000, as opposed to the $6,000 to $12,000 per employee that was spent at SAP when Singh worked there, he stressed. With cloud-based computing, large and small companies have access to the same infrastructure, Singh said. The core infrastructure will scale as Appirio grows, he said.

"We even manage the subscription process of how we actually look at licensing our customers inside of Salesforce," Singh said.

While acknowledging the risks that Google's applications and Salesforce.com are not immune to system failures, Singh nonetheless stressed the high uptime rates, estimating that Salesforce.com is has better than a 99.9 percent uptime rate. Appirio expects these uptimes to increase, he said. Appirio had pondered building redundant systems for some customers and process areas but has not acquired this capability, Singh said.

Appirio at the conference introduced Premium and Personal editions of its Sync tools intended to make individuals more productive. These tools provide synchronization for Google and Salesforce.com so users can more easily connect to their day-to-day productivity tools, the company said.

The company also now offers a package service to help prototype business models using on-demand platforms. The Business Model Prototyping service is based on a four-to-eight week engagement for executives at large and mid-sized businesses.

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Bob Rice is the author of Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, and the former C.E.O. of a tech startup. He now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

Love 'em to death, but here's the thing to remember about Google: Your business is its business.

Google doesn't sell software or hardware or content. It sells you -- or, slightly more precisely, its ability to understand your habits and deliver your attention to particular advertisers. And because of this, I am just a touch nervous about installing Chrome, its new browser software.

Of course, Google already collects mountains of information about you from your searches (you do realize they keep track of those, right?), and from the huge cookie collection delivered fresh daily by their ad bakery (the cookie gathers information from all Google products and affiliates -- and doesn't expire until 2038). Gmail users may also have long ago realized they were conceding privacy for convenience and bells and whistles.

Indeed, Google has far more and better data about your habits than the relatively modest amounts that set of privacy firestorms for AOL and DoubleClick (which Google now owns) back in the day. But so far, with Google, it's been like successfully boiling a frog: the temperature has gone up very slowly, so nobody's jumped out of the pot just yet.

Perhaps that's because Google offers so many wonderful services. Who wants to head out without checking the traffic with Google Maps (oops, more footprints)? Or plan an event without checking everybody's calendar (oy...)?

At first glance, Chrome seems just another browser -- and between us, who cares? IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome -- one has more cup-holders, another has leather trim. So is the idea really just to take a piece of the "browser business," as many say? I doubt it, largely because there isn't one: Nobody's paid for browser software since about 1998. Firefox, remember, is the product of a nonprofit -- one that, interestingly, has been heavily funded by Google, for reasons previously unknown.

At first, Google's goal will be to change the software game and speed your transition from a desktop-driven environment to its "cloud computing" applications: word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Google hopes that soon, you'll create these documents on one computer, leave them on their servers in the sky, and then continue working on them later from any other computer. Natch, you'll collaborate, share and deliver the docs this way, too. And Chrome will be the interface for it all, on top of serving more mundane web surfing functions.

And all the while, Google will be doing the usual, capturing your data, your documents, your habits.

And, how will they use all this information? To do what they do: deliver ever more precisely targeted ads, with concomitant higher response rates, and thus generate more dollars. Maybe we'll see "This cell sponsored by Fidelity" in our spreadsheets soon.

Sure, other companies are in position to track your data, too. The difference is that, for the most part, their business models don't require them to exploit that knowledge. And certainly nobody has the reach that Google has and will have -- especially after they eliminate your last ability to hide with the G-phone this fall.

Now we know Big Brother's real name, do we care? Free software and services are great, and I'd rather see relevant ads than irrelevant ones. But make no mistake: this lunch, too, has a real cost. It's called privacy.

So that's the question consumers have to answer: Is it worth it? If they genuinely don't care about one company controlling a complete catalog of their surfing and working, talking and texting, and meetings and greetings, fine. For me, I think I'd rather pay cash and avoid a virtual peeping Tom who only makes money if he predicts my private behavior well. But, then, I admit it: I'm so 2005.

So, shine up your computer with Chrome if you like; but at least consider getting that "Do No Evil" promise in writing first.