Yesterday Google sponsored lunch at the KM World and Intranets 2008 conference, and while we noshed on chicken, they promoted the Google Search Appliance. I'll spare you all the various whoppers they told, but the most amusing was how one of their largest customers managed a major enterprise search system with "only .2 head count." Well, perhaps it only takes one-fifth of a person to put the appliance in a rack and make sure it's powered and connected. Do you think that alone will get you good results across your enterprise? For a neat explanation of the likely implausibility of this for you, check out the ever-reliable analysis of Martin White.

Part of Google's spiel included two clever movies, and I couldn't help but notice that they streamed the video off local files on their laptop hard drives rather than the vaunted Google cloud. And I can certainly understand why. If you're going to do something very important, should you depend on the vagaries of public networks and servers?