The Google Effect…

I can’t say that I know Eric Schmidt personally, but I must admit, I am heavily influence by his leadership. His blurring of  the lines between conventional enterprise technology and the technology as it revolves around the individual user experience coupled with his continued expansion toward leveraging all levels of the cloud computing environment is hard to miss. Even if this guy and the entire Google machine scares the crap out of you, I recommend following his activity. I don’t know him personally, but I do think he is an effective, unconventional leader. Actually, I believe that the more Google sets a pace for cloud based user driven services, the more churches will look to for profit companies who offer these huge architectures with a better user experiences that are offered for free to non-profits. I am more concerned about losing business to companies like Google, who make most of their money on for profit ventures and give services away to non-profits and charities for free, than I am concerned about losing business to any of our current competitors. I have great respect for our competitors and actually appreciate the accountability that competition brings to the table. However, the Google business model is a business theme we should all be watching. Even if churches, charities and the entire world never fully trust Google, they have a powerful business model that is being followed by others.