This morning Symantec corp is launching their GoEverywhere beta product, an offering that they’re describing as;

a secure SaaS-based workspace that allows users to access their preferred third party web-based email, IM, office and other online applications from one central online location

The idea of GoEverywhere seems to be to simplify web application use for the Joe-average user, allowing single sign on to whatever web based applications or storage the user wants. Many of us who evangelise cloud computing have been concerned about the practicalities of using dozens of different web apps with different logons. GoEverywhere attempts to manage that difficulty.

Don Kleinschnitz, manager of GoEverywhere didn’t do start-ups any favors when he said that;

We’re simply giving you a windows to your Web applications that you can customise as you please GoEverywhere is obviously not the first WebTop, but it’s the first created by a large enterprise. All the others are from start-ups and people are afraid to use them

Ouch! Although he does have a bit of a point. Having said that, and notwithstanding the size of Symantec as an organisation, it is a little concerning (fat least for those who value continuity of supply over the “latest-greatest”) that there is no word on how GoEverywhere will be monetised – it’d be nice to so some detail around this before evangelising users onto the service.

It seems the Symantec crew had a read of a post I wrote a few months ago, calling for an aggregation of multiple applications in one location – go everywhere seems to be a nice start down that road.

The video below (alternative title – Cloud Computing 101?) gives an intro to the concept of GoEverywhere

And the next video gives a slightly more in-depth look at how to use the GoEverywhere service.

Initial thoughts;

  • Nice use of tag clouds
  • Nice that Symantec (despite suggesting their own products first) is opening the sandpit for others to come play in
  • Nice integration of storage and applications
As with all thing web 2.0-ish, a good product is just the first part, it'll be interesting to see how Symantec develop the business model for GoEverywhere.

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