Phil Wainewright from ZDNET wrote an article recently titled Google’s culture ‘not fit’ for enterprise apps. It basically follows through the blog post of Sergey Solyanik from Microsoft. Sergey worked at Microsft since the late 1990s, quit and went to work for Google, realized Microsoft is better suited to him, recently re-joined Microsoft, and wrote this blog post on why Microsoft makes better career sense for him than Google.

Sergey’s post is interesting and offers a number of things that Google does better than Microsoft, such as peer-based reviews rather than manager-based reviews. And of course Sergey mentions things that make Microsoft a better workplace, such as the fact that everything Google makes is about “coolness” first, and quality second. At Microsoft, Sergey argues, products are made to be sold, so quality comes first, “coolness” second.

Sergey brings up a great point about how Google is just not culturally fit yet to handle large-scale, error-free business applications. They are masters at cool web-based “time-wasters”, but they have a long way to go to match Microsoft in enterprise apps.

I can agree with this statement. Google are masters at online applications and making them super user-friendly. So what does this mean, Google SaaS applications cannot compete to Microsoft’s products? SaaS cannot compete in the enterprise world? I think that’s false. Not to sound ruthless but in the world of business, the main driving force to making a great enterprise app is money. Microsoft sells its apps for money and thus has to offer enterprise applications that are on-par with the money requested. Google puts an emphasis on free and cool to win customers - which leads to buggy code with less features. Maybe Google can’t compete today, but this doesn’t mean they cannot adjust quickly and start making enterprise apps tomorrow. Until then I believe they have kicked Microsoft’s ass in Search and AdSense.

However, at the end of it all, I don’t know if it is fair to base whether Google can make enterprise apps or not on Sergey deciding to that Microsoft is better suited for his career.