RKG Logo

Taking clear aim at Microsoft’s immense Office revenue stream, Google announced Google Apps Premier yesterday.

$50 per year for Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator, 10 gigs of storage, and service level agreement promising 99.9% uptime and 24/7 tech support.

And rumor has it a Google Outlook clone is coming soon.

The two obvious concerns are availability (no web access = no access to your documents; or, Google goes down = no access to your documents) and security (Google can see all your stuff; hackers who crack into Google can also see all your stuff). I think the second is a far greater concern than the first.

(Interesting pdf on recent Google exploit, in this case Desktop Search: check out Watchfire’s whitepaper, “Overtaking Google Desktop“).

The $50 price point for whole darn suite is certainly on the money for SOHO and small businesses. Office is clearly monopoly priced, and Outlook takes too much hassle to administer. SoftwareAsAService makes clear sense for many homes and businesses.

I don’t think large corporations are going to trust Google (or any outside hosted webapp) with all their spreadsheets and email, however. Wouldn’t there be Sarbanes-Oxley issues regarding sensitive financial data on publically traded firms?

The real killer app will be Google Apps running inside a corporate firewall, on a corporation’s own servers, regularly updated and patched and help-desked by Google, and all happily SarbOx compliant. I predict we’ll see that by year’s end.

Watch your back, MSFT.

If you like this post, consider subscribing to our RSS feed. You can also have new posts sent to you via email.

Share this post (via email, Digg, Delicious, etc)

Possibly Similar Posts

Trackback

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/02/23/google-launches-googleapps/trackback/

No Comments Yet

Your comment will be first!

Your Comment

Email Updates

Categories

Recent Comments

  • George Michie: Chris, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a real number. Inc says they have 550 employees, so their income would have to be $50...
  • George Michie: Hi Christian, I suppose they take the same percentage hit off their commission that the retailer does. To my thinking it's the...
  • Chris Zaharias: I read the magazine on a flight Sunday and recall seeing iCrossing on there at ~~$100M in revenues, and thought the same thing of...
  • Alan Rimm-Kaufman: Christian -- I didn't mean to imply all retailers will face Q4 losses. But it is not improbable that many retailers will be...
  • Christian Little: Despite the economic crisis, how could most retailers be facing a Q4 loss? For most retail this is the best time of the year, you...
  • Christian Little: That's pretty remarkable...makes me want to build a coupon site lol. Don't coupon sites take a huge hit in commissions though...
  • Stephen Schramke: Sage advice. Thanks for sharing!
  • George Michie: Could be Neil. I have my doubts. My suspicion is that there just isn't much work being done, other than taking commission checks to...
  • Neilzb: Those numbers are pretty remarkable, but if I had to guess I would say that it’s possible that they are just 8 people 'outsourcing' full...
  • Jeff Cornejo: I disagree that a revenue/employee ratio shows ANY kind of profitability. If anything, a mostly-passthrough model, with high...
  • George Michie: Hi Dan, The IP address of the advertiser isn't a factor, anyone can run geo-targeted ads regardless of where their website resides....
  • dan shipe: Hey, me again. What about possible exploits to this system? Adwords must evaluate the geographic region based on the IP address of the...
  • Mark Matsusaki: I think I'm in agreement with the previous posting in that ROI is the metric used by many decision makers to measure the value of...
  • George Michie: Thanks for your comments Ophir, you raise excellent points. Particularly as Geo-targeting competition in different areas moves...
  • SEO Services: Nice Post. Thanks for sharing this information with us.

Blog Stats

  • Posts: 758
  • Words: 336,078
  • Comments: 1,340

Administration

Close
  • Social Web
  • E-mail
Powered by ShareThis