Google announced a wide variety of new products and features during the Google I/O 2015 Keynote yesterday.  At first glance, most of them are consumer focused.  Google Photos, Brillo for smart home automation, virtual reality headsets, etc.  However, several of the announcements or themes have an impact on the enterprise world.

Globalization and Mobile First

Google emphasized many times during the keynote how little of the world is currently covered with fast broadband. They are now deploying special low-bandwidth versions of their most important sites like google.com, Maps and YouTube to help the rest of the world access them reliably. Those emerging markets are almost entirely “mobile first”, or really “mobile only”.  Most new customers in India and China will *never* own a desktop computer. They rely exclusively on mobile computing devices.

When building enterprise applications that could possibly be accessed outside of the US or a few other select countries, we should follow Google’s lead.  Don’t overlook the need for low-bandwidth, offline-capable, mobile-ready configurations.