Google Tells Developers to Design Apps for a Billion Users

By Amy Thomson

As Google Inc. (GOOG) supplies more programs used by businesses, it’s asking developers to forgo complicated enterprise-management tools and focus on applications that would be useful to at least a billion people.
“Don’t do anything unless it can be used by a billion,” said Thomas Davies, director for Google Enterprise in northern, eastern and central Europe, at the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit in London today. “Do something that is good for other people.”
The move is part of a trend toward making software for businesses work more like the apps customers use on personal devices. Employees typically start demanding that employers adopt new consumer technologies 18 to 24 months after they arrive, Davies said. The popular Gmail service was created in the early days of Google when two engineers became frustrated with the way the
corporate e-mail system worked, Davies said.
Enterprise software has lagged behind the rest of the industry and is benefiting from new, consumer-focused developers, said Duncan Angove, president of enterprise-software company Infor Inc. One of the company’s recent projects for hospital staff involved creating a chat feature for nurses who were too busy to take time out to call administration.
“Human beings don’t gravitate toward” bad experiences, Angove said in an interview after the panel. “When you bring people in from different domains, they ask a whole different set of questions.”