pcnelson.com

Google Apps will launch in the morning providing free application based services for your domain name. They will provide email, calendaring, Google Talk, and Page Creator for your domain name. In other words you can have a google mail account but it will be @pcnelson.com, not gmail.com. This may be Google’s first run at Microsoft’s overwhelming domination in the business back office software market. Exchange is the dominant email server in the enterprise realm; is it possible for Google to challenge this with free web based products? Possibly, but I feel that these offerings will fall short for several reasons. Web based email is just that, it is web based. Sure you can use a client to check it, but most security conscious organizations want to know who is administering email clients. In addition it is difficult to meet the special needs of an organization such as Blackberry support. Google Apps may be a super service for the small office just getting off the ground, but for most IT departments it will just not fit the bill. This will be interesting to track for the next few months to see if Google has any success in this market.

Update: Here is a link to the new services from Google