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Google’s Bradley Horowitz and Dave Girouard Confirms Google Buzz Standalone and Google Buzz Enterprise to come and denies ‘Buzz Is Dead’ rumor

Yesterday, in a odd chain of events this Tweet said “ChrisSaad: Google just announced that Buzz ‘as is’ is dead #tcdisrupt” and appeared in reshares on Google Buzz starting many unfounded rumors.

I could not find any direct quotes from Bradley Horowitz on this subject so I went directly to Mr. Horowitz and asked for clarification on his own Google profile.

Bradley Horowitz, Vice President, Product Management said in a reply to the Tweeted rumor on Google Buzz….

Allow me to clarify. MG introduced the term “stumble” in relation to Google’s social efforts, and “tweaks” in relationship to changes we’ve made in Buzz to date…

I played off his imagery, and said (paraphrasing from memory): “Sometimes when you stumble, you get up, dust yourself off like nothing happened… and continue on your merry way. Sometimes when you stumble, you get up, and ask yourself if you’re heading down the right path… or whether a course-correction is in order. We’re in that latter case. Buzz is important and we’re committed to it, and continue learning from it. But it’s not the sum total of our social strategy. One of the reasons why you may have characterized the changes we’ve made as ‘tweaks’ is because we’ve got some bigger, more impactful improvements on the way. Sadly, we’re not here to announce anything specific today, but watch this space.”

Additionally MG asked me if we still had plans to launch “standalone Buzz” and I confirmed that we do! Additionally, Dave Girouard (our head of Enterprise) spoke about Enterprise Buzz in the very next panel.

So there you have it. I’ve nothing to add except that I find it baffling to read into this that Buzz is dead, dying, or not important to Google. In fact think I said many things to the contrary.

Hopefully someone will be able to discover a link to the video itself…

No Problem, here is the Girouard video

Curiously I have not been able to find any quotes online so far except for this quote from Yahoo news but I do have the full video below….

Interestingly, Google’s president of enterprise, Dave Girouard, said that Google has an unreleased enterprise version of its Google Buzz product that it has not released to Google Apps, but that company employees use internally.

Here is the full interview with Dave Girouard, at TechCrunch Disrupt where this quote was taken from.

The quote occurs at 12:00

Unfortunately I was not able to find the video that Mr. Bradley Horowitz appeared in.

Believe me, all of us using Buzz are excited to see the 3 million business Apps users and over 7 million college students use Google App for Education hopefully all coming to Buzz very soon. Thanks for the great information from you both.

From Google’s own list of corporate officers;

Bradley Horowitz oversees product management for Google Apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Docs, Blogger and Picasa. Before joining Google, Bradley led Yahoo’s advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Bradley holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab and was pursuing his Ph.D. there when he co-founded Virage.

Dave Girouard manages Google’s growing enterprise business worldwide. He leads a team responsible for sales, marketing, product development and customer support. Prior to joining Google, Dave was senior vice president of marketing and business development at Virage, a provider of multimedia search and content management software. Dave also founded and developed Virage’s application services business. He came to Virage from the worldwide product marketing organization at Apple, where he spent several years in product management. Prior to that, Dave was an associate in Booz Allen & Hamilton’s Information Technology practice in San Francisco. He started his career in enterprise systems development and integration in the Boston office of Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting).

Dave graduated from Dartmouth College with an AB in Engineering Sciences and a BE in Computer Engineering. He also received an MBA from the University of Michigan with High Distinction.