The search giant has a proud history of helping small businesses: with Gmail, Maps and Docs, it has helped make it easy, and free, for companies to step into the digital economy. At Mountain View last week, this took a new step forward with the release of Universal Analytics, which will allow firms to collect and analyse all digital business intelligence, from telephone calls to barcode scans, using their popular Google Analyticstool. Previously, users could only examine web data; now, they can stitch together all their users' activity, from several different devices and media, giving what is known in the trade as a "single customer view".
This will allow firms to deal far more easily with the tangled spaghetti-ball of information that the "big data" revolution has provided. But it's far from clear how the EU will see it, from a legal point of view.
Until last year, Google were told that their analytics product was illegal in Germany. There is still huge confusion over the application of the stringent EU web privacy legislation in different member states, something that Google say is the responsibility of the end user. Clancy Childs, the product manager for Google Analytics, was keen to stress at the launch that the tool will not be allowed to collect any personally identifiable information; usernames and customer IDs can be used, but if you use it to collect private data, such as email or home addresses, then you will have your data deleted. But whether that will satisfy the European bureaucrats is unclear.
Which is worrying, for both Google and businesses. More than half of the world's top million websites have already installed Google Analytics. The free-to-install platform has helped websites measure their marketing and content performance since Google acquired it in 2005, and by extending its functionality, Google are effectively challenging an business-software group that includes Oracle and IBM.
Of course, as with so many of Google's products, "free" has its limits: once you hit a certain level of usage, the data becomes sampled unless you invest in their Premium product. But this "freemium" model has worked well enough in the past that they confidently expect a large number of businesses to be signing up, because a user-friendly way of accessing big data will make a real difference to how companies operate.
But as I've written before, if the EU clamps down over privacy even where no personal information is revealed, it will cripple a booming sector of the British economy. Businesses everywhere will be watching closely to see whether Google's Universal Analytics can jump through their hoops.
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