Google launched Google Sites yesterday after a long 16 month wait. After acquiring the promising startup, Jotspot, Google went into a long hiatus with rumors of impending launch coming out in regular intervals. Finally, Google released it as a part of Google Apps Suite yesterday night. My first reaction to the release was one of disappointment.

When Jotspot was acquired by Google almost 1 1/2 years ago, they were racing at full throttle releasing great features which could help businesses take care of their intranet (even internet) needs. Google’s acquisition raised the possibility of an enterprise level application with a potential to put Google at a striking distance from Microsoft. In fact, there were claims about Google Sites being a Microsoft Sharepoint killer. After checking out Google Sites for a few hours, I came back with an impression that it is more like Pbwiki or Wikidot. In fact, it doesn’t even match up with some of the features of Wikidot, like using a custom domain instead of getting redirected to a Google’s domain. The only advantage I see over Pbwiki or Wikidot is Google’s ability to scale and their resources to secure the data. At this point of time, I will call Google Sites to be a competitor to PbWiki, Wikidot kinda products and there is no way we can consider this to be a Sharepoint killer.Dennis Howlett of ZDNet Enterprise Blog says it the best

After 16 months at Google developer’s hands, the outcome is substandard. This is such a pity. In its JotSpot incarnation, it was far from perfect but that didn’t matter because JotSpot was shedding light on a new way of collaborating. Since passing into Google’s hands, the guts have been ripped out and then re-assembled with as much Google ’stuff’ as they could cram in but rushed to completion.

Google cannot expect to convince enterprise community with a collection of kiddie gadgets made by 10 year old programmers. They should have atleast collected enterprise ready gadgets before releasing this product. I hope that Google comes out with a better product in the next version. Till then, I can only recommend this product for informal group collaboration. It is not even Small Business ready.