Google Apps Premier Edition Launches

prostoalex writes "Google Apps is adding a premium offering: a custom 10-GB Gmail box, Google Calendar, GTalk instant messenger, Writely, Google Pages, Google Custom home page iGoogle and Google SpreadSheets for $50 a year per employee. The NYTimes provides some details on competitive pricing: 'By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange,... in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.' Boston.com quotes an analyst for Nucleus Research on Google's ease-of-use: '"What we see in the Google Apps is a real focus on making them easy to use and intuitive," she said. "And that's something that Microsoft has been unable to do in all of its years with Office."' But the same analyst is bearish on Google Apps' shortcomings relative to the mature Microsoft desktop products: 'Right now Google's going to give companies a better ability to negotiate with Microsoft.'"

Comments

Re:obvious flaw?

[peragrin]

being able to access your data and apps anywhere is just as useful when your laptop gets stolen.

In the en it is a mixed bag. Somethings will require local data. Other times i really miss having everything on the network. Finding a balance between the two will be the best bet.

Besides a corporation or government who gives their employees data to take home is just asking for trouble. How much of ten's of thousands of customer personal data has been lost your way?

I just am tired of waiting for corporations to stand up and upgrade their networks to even present standards. the USA doesn't even have 3G yet Japan and europe are working on going beyond that.

Re:Instant messenger?

[lucabrasi999]

Forgive my ignorance, but I thought that everyone except Google believes GChat to be a great time-waster, not something you'd offer to your corporate clients to increase productivity at work...?

I was about to moderate this discussion, but I had to respond to you. Instant Messaging, despite rumors to the contrary, can actually be a very productive tool at work. My company uses Lotus Sametime, and I have found it to be a very useful way to get responses to quick questions. No, you cannot hold major discussions over Instant Messaging. And, if you work in a small (

IMHO, the productivity that is gained by Corporate IM easily outshines to potential pitfalls.

Needs to be an appliance

[smcdow]

My company has been interested in Google Apps for a while, but we won't touch it until we can buy an Google Apps appliance machine and install it in our own facility.

We're not holding our breath.

Why should companies trust Google?

[gsyswerda]

Why would a company entrust Google with all their corporate emails, and many of their files as well?

Big cost saver potentially

[Mr. Underbridge]

They're focusing on the $225 vs $50 per employee per year, but $225 isn't the TCO number. You also have to calculate the salaries of the IT staff who maintain the company email server and such, or the hosting for the same. I expect that pushes the number far higher. I'm assuming that Google will also see better uptime than the typical small-company email server, and it's probably smaller companies who will find this most attractive. If I were starting my own company, today, I'd go with this. If I started up with 10 people, I'm looking at $500 per year for full mail hosting and document storage as well as infrastructure for collaboration. I also won't have to buy a single server for anything. I don't have to worry about documents getting lost.

For what you get, and for everything that you *don't* have to buy, that's idiotically cheap.