Self-Reflection on Google Forms as an Enterprise Solution
After leaving Google a year ago, I’ve become more aware of how the rest of the world operates. One thing that’s been quite surprising is that lots of schools, businesses, enterprises, and startups are using Google Forms or Google Classroom for public processes. Not just for kid stuff like turning in homework, but also for doing business-critical functions like lead generation, market research, and even VC-fund investor sign-ups!
To be honest, after years of using Google Forms for only internal processes, at first, I thought, Jeez, these companies must not have a lot of budget to be forced to use such simple solutions, but then one day, my brain made a switch:
The alternative to using Google Forms is that major companies (even Google!) would need to pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain simple web forms/CRUD applications. While you can always argue for deep integrations, not everyone gets there, and that could mean a lot of waste. Deploying highly-paid engineers to do basic webpage maintainance when non-technical staff (or a third-party agency) could have done the same thing in a week with Google Forms!
I’m not even thinking about the potential of #nocode solutions, but there’s a lot of opportunities there, too.
…[Instead of working on their core product,] companies are paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain simple web forms/CRUD applications. That’s a lot of waste.
A very relevant example (to me, anyway) is when Uber hired a large internal tools team — and then downsized it, a few years later— to build a Slack replacement called UChat (https://eng.uber.com/uchat/)... they could have put those Engineers on their core business or run a much tighter ship! Hubris can sometimes get the best of us in Silicon Valley.
Salesforce.com is another great example of a company that has changed many industries despite having an imperfect product. I know many technical leaders who would claim that they can build a better CRM, but Salesforce is still good enough for the vast majority of companies. Internal staff is usually better deployed on your core product.
Anyway, I’ll probably just conclude here. Now whenever I see organizations using Google Forms, I see it as a sign of financial restraint and discipline that’s super valuable. Especially during times of economic depression, you can’t be wasteful with how you deploy your technical resources. In 2020, people who have moved to the cloud are experiencing not just cost-savings, but also an increase in mental bandwidth to focus on what matters in their business. I think this is a good thing and a trend we’ll continue to see in both good times and bad times.
