One of the stranger keynotes at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference was given by Rishi Chandra, the Product Director for Google Enterprise. I expected the head of Google’s Enterprise division to spend his time talking about Google Docs, GTalk, Gmail for the enterprise, the recent launch of Google Sites, or any of the half dozen or so applications Google offers. Instead, he spent nearly all his time talking about the benefits of storage in the cloud.

Many attendees at the conference shrugged. They’d heard the cloud pitch from Google before. But the talk struck me as odd for a few reasons:

1. Storage in the cloud is an outsourcing play targeted at CIOs and IT department heads, but the Enterprise 2.0 conference is focused on bringing Web 2.0 tools to typical knowledge workers.
2. Storage in the cloud is all about outsourcing your datacenter. That’s great from a bottom-line cost reduction perspective, but Enterprise 2.0 is about the top line — making employees more productive.

Maybe Google’s working on something cool they can’t talk about yet. Or maybe Google doesn’t have a real Enterprise 2.0 story. Yet for some reason, Google decided to show up at the conference anyway, and talk about infrastructure.
Microsoft, IBM and Sun were all there, on hand to show off their social computing solutions. What’s up with Google?

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5. Enterprise 2.0 – Because the Internet has no point.