Who would have thought that an after-hours Chamber of Commerce speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan by a former JotSpot exec could set the blogosphere abuzz with rumors of the impending death of Web Content Management as we know it? And yet, that's exactly how word of something called "Google Sites" leaked out last week, resulting in a mad torrent of news stories and blogs with dramatic titles like "Can Google Sites Make Intranet CMS Dinosaurs Extinct?"

What we know is that former JotSpot VP of Product Development Scott Johnston (now with Google) did say, in a November 29 presentation in Ann Arbor, that Google intends, in 2008, to roll out something called "Google Sites," which "will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps." 

What's got people excited, apparently, is the (fanciful) notion that the cross-breeding of JotSpot (a structured Wiki wrapping a cornucopia of microapps) with Google Page Creator (an uninspired WYSIWYG page designer that ranks among the least-well-known Google apps) might  yield a Vignette-killer: a Google Apps Web CMS suite for crafting "Enterprise 2.0" intranets on demand, quickly, securely, at surely, a fraction of the cost of a brand-name solution. Google will host your pages and data; you'll cache content on your local machine via a clever data-layer abstraction called Google Gears. JotSpot-derived microapps will do the rest. Fade to black, roll credits.

Time to step back from the Kool-Aid cart for a minute.

The absurdities in the above picture defy easy enumeration. But let's start with the simple observation that Google Apps haven't exactly set the world on fire. Google Spreadsheets proved to be no Excel-killer. No one would seriously suggest that Google Base is a SharePoint-killer. Google Talk has not overtaken AIM, and Google Mail is no threat to any decent e-mail client. Let's be honest. Google Apps vary widely in quality of implementation, but by and large, even the best of them are not showpieces of usability. Most are just plain ugly. Some barely work. (Google Page Creator falls in the latter category.) But that hasn't deterred Google Labs from introducing new Google Apps faster than you can pull the toilet handle.

Note that Google does best when it can address a well-known, largely one-dimensional problem, like website search with the Google Appliance, or web-based e-mail client with GMail. Supporting an Intranet is an entirely different animal -- unless your Intranet is simply a collection of loosely-joined social software applications whose usability holds little importance to you.

Google has a well-deserved reputation, at this point, for throwing hastily-concocted betaware over the fence to see how many dogs respond. Now, with JotSpot, the dogs are about to be fed a few morsels of sirloin. Until proven otherwise, we'll assume that Google Sites will yield more bark than bite.