The way to think of this is through the migration path of desktop applications. All you have to do is imagine that Chrome OS windowing is widgety, like Adobe Air with that level of cool look and feel. If it's that good it will be a huge success. That's because what Google understands is that software engineering is undergoing a revolution - people are developing applications at scale for the web, not for the IT data center, mainframes, or for desktop PCs.

Think about it. If you were going to start a software development company today that you expect to have a million customers, it would be nothing like Autocad, or Teradata - a company that expects to ship a set of CDs to an IT department to install on their servers with InstallShield. You wouldn't be debugging the software for different hardware configurations and writing a huge document about minimum hardware requirements. No. You would be thinking about owning your own private cloud, the software never leaves and you attract subscribers.

With desktop computing, you had your own disk and your own word processor. That was WordPerfect, you collaborate with no one. Remember? Then you got the read only web, you paid your ISP for disk and used Dreamweaver to FTP your words up to your provider. Then you began to collaborate and you used Cold Fusion to manage content in a shared space. Now there's TypePad where the entire process is hosted for a service fee. All the software and all the disk is not owned by you but you collaborate with everyone. Just like you don't own Slashdot's disk or software.

The point is that software development in the abstracted web allows you to ... well you already know this. So the right widgets to manage your cloud disk are all you need, that's what a cloud OS needs to have. The right tools to give you the ability to manage and control your space in the new paradigm. And for programmers a set of APIs that allow you to connect to massive cloud subsystems instead of things like USB peripherals.

Clouds are new in that they are elastic. In the 60s, you bought fractional computing of a fixed resource, like a couple floors of the Empire State Building. It was all zero sum. Now it is not. Cloud providers are what enterprise IT would be if they grew up. Most corporate IT does not and will not even use IPV6 - talk about security. There are real cloud providers today that won't accept data unless it is encrypted and field encrypted too. That's more secure than 90% of enterprise data. I've written more than 150 BI datamarts at companies whose names you know, and I guarantee you that almost none of them bother to encrypt any ETL streams and only half enforce password discipline. Just applying nominal discipline to the migration of BI data will improve the overall security of corporate data. But you can best believe it will be tested.

It's not even OLAP 0.5.

Fusion Tables is to OLAP what Dreamweaver is to Typepad. It's a very elementary storage capability that demonstrates Google's ability to abstract what they do on the back end to 'tables'. It is so far from an OLAP or BI system as to be a joke. Oracle and Microsoft have nothing to fear just like Bloomberg has nothing to fear from Google Finance. There are three reasons.

1. It's not OLAP. As a very elementary and basic thing, you'd have to be able to do operations in an abstracted, dimensionally aware language across multiple entities. You should be able to say 'reduce all of my global warming statistics by 5%'. Fusion Tables doesn't come close to being able to do that, much less handle conditional logic.

2. There's no migration facility. Upload a spreadsheet? You couldn't even get a business that runs Quickbooks to upload their records sensibly into Fusion Tables, let alone an enterprise.

3. Everybody who actually does BI for a living is not impressed. There's no *reason* to move because this offers nothing *new*. There are fundamental reasons why good BI is hard. When open-source BI vendors like Pentaho start saying - hey we quit, then that's when it's time to pay attention.

Google would be wise to put in some facility to integrate these objects with the blogosphere, something nobody has yet done. When these little tables are containerized such that they can be embedded like YouTube videos, complete with visualization, that will be a success. Get it as good as a generalized Gapminder (pitifully slow at gapminder.com) and then we can talk; it will be more like OLAP but it still won't be real OLAP, much less enterprise OLAP. -- I think there are some fundamental problems that Google has anyway, with regards to the size of data that works in parallel across their storage infrastructure that is going to screw up their ability to manage the nitpicky drips of data that matter in datasets of OLAPable interest.

Airset handles the incompatibility problem. There is a synch tool that allows it to talk to Outlook and you can export everything into ics. I'll be using it until Google or somebody else specifically implements a palm synch.