Google Apps – oh my

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has entered the corporate office suite world with their for-pay offering, termed, Google Apps Premier Edition for $50/yr/user. The cost includes word processing and spreadsheet applications, calendar, e-mail, instant messaging, as well as guaranteed up-time, IT management tools, and technical support. A lot beefier than the free offering available on their website. Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), Proctor & Gamble (NYSE: PG) and General Electric (NYSE: GE) are some of the early adopters of the product, which lends more credibility to Google Apps. There are also companies working with Google to integrate their product suite into Google Apps, to make it more appealing to businesses. Avaya (NYSE: AV) is one such company, who intends to integrate its VOIP platform with Google Talk to offer subscribers a single in-box for voice, e-mail, IM, and faxes. Though this does not directly compete with Microsoft Office, it most certainly takes a bite out of Offices’ dominant market share.

Not too long ago people were writing off the online application market, citing the slow response times, lack of drag-&-drop, companies not willing to store their data on 3rd party machines etc. All a thing of the past, while apps like this does not mean the complete replacement of desktop apps, it does indeed signify a paradigm shift. The reasons for which are many including, an increasingly distributed workforce, becoming more cost aware, global data accessibility requirements and the wide availability of broadband. Sitting in your local coffee shop, collaborating with your co-workers via IM and while on a conference call with your boss in Japan is all now a reality and Google Apps is one of the tools required to achieve this nirvana. Just ask 37Signals about it, they’ve been peddling their brilliant online applications to small businesses for quite a while now, and have been very successful at it. They, as do Google, like to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), which is something most other companies need to do. User adoption is difficult when application interfaces are complex and confusing and when they actually have to stop what they are doing to learn how to use a new product, instead of changing tools and chugging along like they used to. Hope someone at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is listening.

Perhaps Scott McNealy will now want to amend his statement to: “The Network is the Desktop”.