The day that everyone knew was coming has arrived with the announcement that Google has launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft.
Michael Arrington posted this afternoon about a rumor of an undetermined major announcement from Google set for tomorrow, now the Wall St. Journal reports that Google Apps Premier has launched.
Google Apps for Your Domain was launched in August. The Google Apps for Your Domain page has already been updated to reflect tonight’s announcement. The service will include the existing Google Apps tools – GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and IM as well as the Google Docs applications that were just integrated into the suite today. Webmail will come with 10 GB of storage and Apps Premier includes service level agreements that promise 99.9% uptime and 24/7 tech support. A full comparison of the standard and Premier services can be found here.
The service costs $50 per user per year, dramatically undercutting Microsoft’s offerings. Google’s package does not currently include a presentation tool like Power Point or a CRM application. The most likely next addition to the package could be an enterprise version of Blogger. General Electric and Proctor and Gamble are cited as among the first Google Apps Premier customers.
One major concern that hangs over the head of tonight’s news is the ongoing question of Google security. TechCrunch asked for months whether business users would or should trust Google Apps with sensitive business information given the regular lapses of security experienced by the company’s hosted services. See a timeline and discussion of those lapses in this post.
Other skeptics have raised concerns about Google’s growing ubiquity and previously unfathomable access to information. Such power undoubtedly carries a political risk that no one can take lightly. The first post I wrote when I started working for TechCrunch was about the prototype ambient audio contextual advertising and search presented by Google Labs in conference this summer.
There are many different ways to look at tonight’s announcement. The discussion via Techmeme includes posts focused on everything from Apps Premier as a complex offensive move not intended to generate revenue to Google’s now greatly expanded call center needs and the Terms of Use that make service termination a bigger risk in office software than ever before. Lots of posts worth reading.
Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion. Google’s technological brilliance is only beginning to be recognized. What do I mean by that? I mean that with its powerful algorithms to analyze and contextualize information, combined with its growing catalogue of information to analyze – Google is an epoch defining company. Send the world’s business communication through Google and the machine gets a whole lot smarter.
Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.
Very intelligent business strategy
So how long before google starts hosting full websites, and starts having priority access to the worlds main ISP’s.
Does it allow a single updated zip-file for all the content/data/history stored within google, for when a customer wants to leave, but not lose everything?
Will the data from corporate accounts (paid non-adverting inc.) be combined with personal google accounts (existing gmail, g:personal)?
It’s one way to make full use of those data-centres.
…But would most people ever have contemplated allowing Microsoft in the latter 90’s this much potential power/dependency, where as lets see how the mainstream media react to this as well as the geeks!
Oh, and what the heck is Yahoo doing, are they just crap at monetising anything, or just hung-up only on UGC?
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
What is so innovative here?
What happens when you are not connected?
Privacy & security are primary concerns.
“good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation”, “historic proportion” – with respect marshall, how much hyperbole!
Weren’t most of these apps, buy-ins, and isn’t premier simply the logical conclusion of those cumalative aquisitions, let alone the developments that people like Ray-Ozzy or Citrix have been working on for how long.
The only two ‘interesting’ aspects of note here are,
(a) the market force potential re: distribution and awareness to the general public of online hosting, but that was going to happen anyway, and
(b) support for 3rd-party apps -if that happens than google is officially becoming a platform/O.S., but not completely unlike the many widget companies.
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
Marshall, I agree this is a good move, but other than the Gmail interface, what’s innovative or brilliant about this?
This is a major power move and a full scale war with Microsoft.
I do wonder how many companies will put sensitive information on Google’s servers…
In response to reasonable skepticism in comments I’ve added a new conclusion to the post that tries to spell out what I see as the possible consequences of this move in more detail.
It’s undeniable that Google Apps Premier is huge and will be very powerful. And yes, it will strengthen Google’s unfathomable access to information.
But none of these is the point.
I think few people realized that this Google Apps Premier is Google’s latest and biggest trick.
Google is using such kind of products to threaten Microsoft and other competitors, to disturb their concentrations and powers on the Search Market!
Attack is the best defense!
—————————
http://www.MillionReturn.Com — Return $1m from 1 page! How?
The move to allow hosted e-mail is just killer!
While it is written very enthusiastic, it’s good to see that the idea of algorithms playing a bigger role in our business / private lifes is being picked up more broadly.
http://www.robi...sloan.com/epic/
https://online....nwort.com/2015/
If you haven’t seen the videos, they offer a good glimpse of what this might lead to.
Marshall,
I like Google, but regarding your new conclusion .. why would any business want to send their communication through Google? What about privacy & security?
The Machine gets smarter? Or, arrogant?
I’m not saying I’m happy about it! I’m just saying, that’s the direction this is pointing, I believe.
It’s this Google’s “Me Too” more than anything else.
Is that “Me too” = Innovation? sad too hear about it.
This is pretty big, although the difference between their free and premium offerings doesn’t seem that big, unless you’re a huge enterprise.
We’ve been using the Google Apps beta for a few months now and overall are quite pleased. The worrying issue for us recently has not been security per se as you mentioned, it has been the fact that Google’s mail servers seem to be get blacklisted from time to time, causing our mails to get bounced, or worse, simply discarded.
About time
Google for sure started the fight with Microsoft!
I’ve said it before: Google haven’t innovated for 2-3 years now.
As others are saying, this is just more “me too”
Sweet. This is going to be very popular with small and medium sized enterprises.
Only foolish stupid companies would use gmail. It’s an awful, poorly designed email system. The UI is poorly designed. Buttons are scattered all over the place. Hell, you can’t even create your own folder structure. Who do you call for help? As far as I can tell, Google has eliminated any email contact links out of their help file. Need help? Post in the user-to-user forum [lol].
And will your corporate email be forever saved, indexed and perhaps exposed to security holes? I’d wager that Google is a popular hacker target. Also attorney’s will love this. A simple subpoena to Google and you’ll easily get all the email trail you need, every email guaranteed to always be available. No delays fighting with the company.
On the comparison page Google list “Email migration tools” as “Limited Release” for the Premier Edition. What exactly does that mean? All I want to know is can I download a single archive with a backup of everything inside; emails, contacts, calendar, etc. That would be worth the fee in my opinion.
It’s of a piece and makes sense, regardless of whether you like it.
The two questions are:
1.How major a concern’s security going to be to be in the beginning?
2. How long before those fears subside?
So long as nothing dramatically horrible happens at the start, security concerns will go away pretty fast.
We use Google Apps for collaboration purposes, but there is no way we would ever consider saving corporate / strategic data on someone elses servers.
This service could be perfect for SME’s but not bigger businesses. Privacy and security of emails wouldnt be a major concern for such firms. If nothing bad happens in the coming months, more firms could get on board.
I wish this contained specific support for Blackberry rather than just having to download some Java app or similar.
1. OpenOffice costs $0.
))
2. If you exclude from Google Spreadsheets sharing features then you get just clumsy and slow web toy compared to OpenOffice Spreadsheet. Now think about Excel.
3. It is much easier to add sharing features to MS Office or free OpenOffice than to build a new office suit using MS IE JavaScript implementation
3a. Existing office applications just need a feature to synchronize documents with central server. That server might be a public server or a private one installed behind enterprise firewalls.
Will, Google Appz can be incorporated with websites published via blogger’s custom domain??
apps !! nice strategy google!!
Open Office IS clumsy. I have had it on my machine because I could not find my office CDs and I rather use Goggle ones than more open office – at least google has listened and uses some of the Excel features more easily.
But things like that aside – I am not even worried about the security issues.
Bigger companies will do of course not put their data onto such a server – something so many developpers already did not understand at office 2.0 in san fran. This is a no go.
But even for smaller businesses – outside of the US that is – there is no way they should put their data and especially their customers data onto such a service as this service is run and does manage the data under US Law. Which in regard to privacy, data protection and everything around it is ridicoulous to non existent.
A European business should be very careful what happens to its business if they naivly use that as a backend and not comply with local laws. I remember vividly the discussion about the simple fact that German Rail wanted to process data for their rebate cards in the States, including photographs. That was not taken lightly by people. And now even more sensible data?
(And yes, that is the same argument I have made yesterday at the girl geek dinner in london where Amazon presented its offerings for businesses. And no, Europeans are not paranoid. It is just that most US people do not know better what working privacy and data protection laws actually mean.*g*)
snore
i posted about this last night with my views about why this might not be for big biz – even though google says they tested with GE. (click my name)
My belief is that companies like GE and the other top fortune 100 for example, will use this as leverage when renewing their contracts with MS. I have seen some of these contracts and they are in the millions of dollars. This is how it will hurt MS. Companies that have proprietary info will not use this because that content should not go “outside the company firewall” so to speak.
It’s high time M$ completly understands this deadly game and they better make their haste.
I’m not sure how this could make sense financially for an existing enterprise or even a start up. $50 per user per year? Buy MS Office once and it is yours or use OO for free. Google’s only advantage is better collaboration capability but I doubt businesses are very excited to give all their data to google.
I’ll bet you next Techcrunch news is going to be million dollar “Re-inventing wheel” webpage with fancy names.
Come on people, start invent something new. Not remodeling the webpage and play with million dollar!!!! Show us, what you can do with million dollar.
Show techcrunch your newest killer app.
This is not very impressive…..It just the same google hype…about business applications that can never be any better than the offering that is currently available from Open Office…..The cost of the Open Office solution per user is 0….and unlike the goolge offering it is open source…..this means that if your business needs to add some functionality they can do it….
The Adelph.us social network currently offers its members “Lightapp” the best business productivity application that is currently available….and it includes a presentation application….and all of the applications are compatible with Microsoft office….and it can be all be used online today for free…..
To me, the security issue is not really a “trust or not trust” google question.
The fundamental question is “trust or not trust hosted”. Enterprises feel better trusting there internal IT teams since it least they have control, if there is a security issue, they can study it, understand it, fix it, and put in place policies to monitor it. Enterprises get stuck when they have hosted solutions, as they basically have to wait to be told “it’s ok now, we fixed it, it will never happen again, and none of you data was compromised.
I have always been amazed at salesforces success in this market. Sales pipeline data and customer list/status is hugely important to an enterprise, but many trust salesforce to host all this data.
Anyone know if salesforce has been a target for hacks ?
According to reports P&G is “testing” their suite. If and when they announce large enterprises *adopting* it, that will be news. Until then, this is just PR timed for release now to take some heat off Viacom’s deal with Joost.
looks like poor old Zoho just got thrown a curveball.
Could Google Apps beat the other existing email solutions? See this post, quite interesting:
http://gspy.blo...um-is-live.html
My people write about Google strategy, which is in my opinion the free-ride trap on the _search_ product brand name. So I’ll write about possible Microsoft strategy
1. MS waits for Google to spend all ads money to build biggest computing center. The center which Google plans to run on all these office applications.
2. MS wants Google engineers to loose beginning enthusiasm and hairs when coding office apps in buggy MS HTML / CSS / JavaScript implementations. Mainly using their talent for finding workarounds for bugs left by MS programmers. Google Web Toolkit is a good example for the one huge workaround.
3. After some time MS will release a new feature for their OS which will make all heavy web applications obsolete. A sandbox which will allow to run applications directly as Windows processes. With similar security restrictions and installation process as JavaScript applications have inside browsers. With IE render engine used as user interface library. But with all good OS features people invented in last 40 years.
I’m having problem with Google mail. Why won’t google put @Google.com?
Does Gmail means Gaymail or Girlmail or Girliemail?
How many men here actually use “Gmail”?
2 concerns are:
1. Outside the US, broadband has a much lower penetration
2. What happens when the broadband goes down and your manager needs an urgent update on an item that is stored somewhere on Google’s servers?
Very interesting tool, but no way my or my company’s data gets stored on Google’s servers. Perhaps if the data was all encrypted and I was the only person that could unlock it. But then a company would need a corporate key to unlock all their employees data.
Slippery Slope, but still exciting and will force MSFT to innovate which is good for consumers.
kinda lame offering. reminds me of google desktop and video. i think it’s clear. google is not apple. they make the aggressive moves but cannot back them up with game-changing offerings.
what legit business will use this? all software and hardware are tax-deductable. profitable companies will continute to rely on what they know will work.
who but startups and penny pinching entrepenuers will be attracted to a web-based spreadsheet and word processing offering from google? seriousy?
microsoft just has to add free web-base options to their office suite and this google launch is dead.
Where is JotSpot?
Tightly integrate Jot with these apps and you’d have something cool.
As is?… It’s nice that you cany buy more email storage…
Microsoft is on the path to a slow death, they played their part in history but now it is simply time to move on.
Only the paranoid survive.
Google’s focus should be “we help people find things.”
If the technology/service doesn’t pass that test, then it shouldn’t be in Google’s portfolio.
It would be more interesting to see Google acquire Garmin.
-Stan
Its 2007 and people are still asking if companies will trust a third party? Is this for real?
A lot of companies hire third party companies to do background services. Payroll is almost always outsourced. Insurance and other benefits information is being turned over to HR BPOs more and more everyday.
So what does this say? Companies won’t dare to put their email on google, but have absolutely no problems passing around employee SSNs, salaries, and medical information all over the Internet?
Seems to me either companies will go with whatever saves them more money in the long run or we should all be more concerned about how our personnel information is being used once we hand it over to HR.
I think google is spreading its efforts too thin. Just leave google to do all sort of these things. In 5 to 10 years google will do lot of me-too stuff and some day realize it has lost its agility. Google burdened by its bureacracy will be hand-tied watching a new search engine racing ahead within few years. Switching the search engine is afterall easiest thing to do, doesn’t cost anything. Business history is replete with such stories. Google executives are not superhuman.
I don’t understand , what is the “big” benefit for organizations?
even if I trust Google gmail as my business email 2 gig are more than enough.
Google Docs… show me one organization that will use it instead of MS office.
I wonder how these google apps handles retention policy.
For example, one may reasonably want a default “destroy all docs older than 3 years” policy. However, if you get a supoena for “all relevant docs” in the 11th month of the 2nd year, you have to keep those docs until you finish fighting the supoena. If you win, you can destroy them but if you lose, you have to produce them.
If google implements “keep forever”, apps is a huge liability. If apps doesn’t support supoena-related activity, it is a huge liability.
Hmmmm. Good for a limited number of small business, but impossible to enforce compliance & regulatory policies on externally hosted data – meaning zero inroads into the corporate space.
http://slantt.n...es-apps-premier