After Google launched its new browser / cloud computing "operating system" earlier this week, plenty of people have had plenty to say about it -- with most of the reactions being positive.

Joe McKendrick of ZDNet notes that Chrome could help to facilitate a smoother path to SOA.

Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek reports that Chrome could face a "long road to enterprise adoption." He quotes a Forrester research analyst as noting that planning for enterprise adoption is premature but that it's important to be aware of the new offering since it could "infiltrate" the enterprise.

CIO.com's C.G. Lynch reports on how Google Chrome could hep online software vendors. The ability to isolate tabs from one another preventing one tab from crashing the entire browser is attractive to some, and better JavaScript support can lead to faster load times for some pages.

Also at InformationWeek, Mary Hayes Weier reports that Google Chrome may benefit SaaS providers while also presenting new problems. The new browser could also tax SaaS development teams by requiring compatibility for yet another browser, meaning more funds in research and development.

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Google has certainly be in the forefront of the cloud computing media this week, launching two new offerings that have the potential to be formidable (depending on whom you talk to, of course.)

The first is called Google Video, an addition to the Google Apps suite that many describe as "YouTube for business." The New York Times describes Google Video as allowing end users to share video with co-workers through a YouTube-like interface. Google believes that the offering will be of interest for functions like training, announcements, and broadcasts of company events.

The other new offering, and one that is arguably more groundbreaking, is the launch of a new web browser that some are describing as an operating system for cloud computing (whereas others laugh at the notion of calling it anything but a browser). The offering, called Google Chrome, was announced through a strange online comic book. Chrome has some interesting features. Google claims that it will keep each tab in an isolated sandbox that prevents one tab from being able to crash the others and gives additional protection against malware. Google also states that it will have a more powerful JavaScript engine to fuel more modern web applications.

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So I'll admit right away that my understanding of the SaaS market is that of a journalist and not of an IT analyst, so I could be missing something here, but this morning I've been reading a lot of discussion of SaaS naysayers after Harry Debes of Lawson wrote a commentary about why the SaaS market would "collapse" within two years.

There have been others who seem to agree with Debes, saying that there is far more money to be made in traditional software than in SaaS and that these technologies didn't offer a viable alternative to traditional on-premise software, noting the lack of any impressive profitability by any SaaS vendor. Others have pointed to recent service failures by major vendors as obvious evidence that cloud computing isn't ready for enterprise use.

Sometimes it feels like many commentators are doubting SaaS because of the burden for the vendor. The idea that SaaS would fail because there were less profits in it sounds silly to me. But I'd think that as long as customers want SaaS, someone is going to be around to provide it for them.

Noted SaaS analyst Jeff Kaplan points this out in a recent article on SeekingAlpha. He writes that, "Debes refuses to see how the SaaS movement is being fuelled by genuine customer demand and is experiencing accelerated growth because of widespread customer satisfaction with the business benefits of SaaS."

The old business adage is that "customer is king." Unless something happened to cause customers to not want SaaS, such as a widespread epidemic of outages or the downfall of the Internet (yes that's a joke), I just cannot see the case that SaaS is going away anytime soon.

Joshua Greenbaum, another ZDNet blogger, probably has the most sensible view on it. He notes that Debes has some points about the SaaS market and he acknowledges the customer appeal factor, but he suggests that pure-play SaaS is not viable in the long run but that as the offerings evolve into more of a "value added SaaS" that SaaS itself is really "only just getting started."

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The big news of the week has been Amazon's launch of its Elastic Block Store (EBS) offering. Amazon EBS works alongside Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service to improve the ability to allocate storage volumes in cloud computing. Reaction across the Web has generally been quite positive, with most feeling that the move further solidifies Amazon's status as a leader in cloud computing. (Anyone remember when Amazon was just an internet book seller?)

Dion Hinchcliffe of ZDNet speculates that the move may mean we're "ready to declare 'time of death' for the enterprise data center." He points out that the new offering means that the EC2 no longer has a maximum storage capacity of up to two terabytes with inefficient on-demand load times, but now with EBS, customers can have potentially even hundreds of terabytes in the "traditional format of choice."

TMCnet reporter Arun Satapathy quotes users singing similar praises of EBS, who represent a wide range of companies from Red Hat to Wired.com.

An article published on Sys Con by Thorsten von Eicken proclaims that the move is a step closer to the "Big SAN in the Sky" offering.

Got thoughts on EBS? Is it the greatest thing since sliced bread? Post 'em below.

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Yesterday Salesforce.com announced its intentions to acquire InStranet, a provider of knowledge management software for call centers. In the press release, the company said it expected the addition of the technology to Salesforce CRM to accelerate business.

There was a lot of reaction to the move around the web. Larry Dignan of ZDNet called it "a departure from Salesforce.com's current playbook" of acquiring SaaS companies that built businesses on the Force.com platform or AppExchange. In addition, the technology could definitely improve results in help center searches -- but Dignan pointed out that the effects of the acquisition are not certain for InStranet customers not already using Salesforce CRM.

In a Wall Street Journal blog, Ben Worthen points out how InStranet's offering is currently an on-premise installation and will thus need to be rewritten in order to be incorporated into Salesforce, and the effort won't be complete until sometime during 2010.

This point was also noted by InformationWeek's Mary Hayes Weier, who reports that the company plans to continue selling and supporting on-premise installations, although this should not be viewed as a change of direction by Salesforce.

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In surfing the Google News headlines the other day, I found a lengthy humor piece in India's Express Computer publication.

The piece had a long theoretical back and forth conversation about how companies look at new technology, but one thing that I thought made sense was the idea that instead of all this 2.0 buzz, we should be using the term 'Live Web' Instead.

Upon Googling the term, I found that this is not the first time the phrase had been used -- Technorati has been using the term for a while, as has Linux Journal, particularly to discuss social media.

I wish this would catch on a bit more. Web 2.0 is such an awful term -- as is Enterprise 2.0, and it is pretty telling that there's still so much disagreement on the definitions for either. "Live Enterprise" could be kind of catchy, although it's probably trademarked by someone or other or is the name of a product. Or what about "Live Software" instead of SaaS? Meh...probably something out there is better, but all the numbers and acronyms could certainly be improved.

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After the much discussed outages at Gmail earlier in the week, many people are expressing doubts over the enterprise readiness of cloud computing technology and people's fears over lack of control of data seem to be reigning.

In a UK blog called Digital Home, writer Dean Evans concludes that the outages mean "cloud computing is far from being an everyday, reliable solution" and he notes the widespread impact of any potential outages.

Similarly, an eWeek piece by Clint Boulton states that Google Gmail and Google Apps are simply "not enterprise ready." But in the piece, Boulton interviewed several analysts, not all of whom agreed -- including IDCs Melissa Webster, who pointed out that nearly all companies have internal outages too even without cloud computing. Google's outages were just more visible. Boulton also interviewed Dana Gardner, who expressed similar sentiments and predicted that Web-based apps would get better over time but internal email systems probably wouldn't have the same "improvement trajectory."

Boulton still concludes that it's too risky to run an enterprise on Gmail and Google Apps and that it's best to wait a bit more time until outages aren't nearly as common -- likely a wise move for a major company, but is anyone really advocating a sudden mass migration of large enterprises onto a 100% cloud computing infrastructure at this point in time? I wouldn't say many people are, although that might be something we see in the future someday.

But as a side note, it is probably too early for these figures to exist, but it would be interesting to see a formal comparison of technology downtime for companies that are using SaaS and other enterprise cloud computing technologies compared to similar companies that have everything in house and managed by in house staff. In my days of working in an office, I recall the business "grinding to a halt" fairly frequently when the company intranet would go down or the email would be inaccessible. It does seem to me that outages are probably nothing new for companies (although I don't know any statistics for large enterprises). I suspect sometimes that these problems seem more threatening when you're not in the driver's seat -- similarly to how so many people (myself included) are more comfortable driving a car rather than flying on an airplane, even though the former is far riskier statistically.

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