Google Goes After Office Application Market

Google, the world leader in search engine technology, is set to announce on Thursday that Google Apps, introduced six months ago, will soon be expanding into the corporate world. The suite of free applications - Google Docs and Spreadsheets for word processing and table calculation, Gmail for emailing, Google Calendars for appointment setting, Google Page Creator for designing and publishing web pages, and Google Talk for online chat - will remain free to use, but corporate entities may now purchase expanded storage and tech support for their employees.

The new suite, rebranded Google Apps Premier Edition (www.google.com/a), will cost businesses $50.00 per user, per year. Beyond the standard free applications, the Premier Edition will include 24-hour telephone support and 10 GB of email storage (compared to 2 GB for free users). In addition to those upgrades, the Premier Edition also comes with a guarantee of 99.9 percent uptime for Gmail, along with APIs (application programming interfaces), that can be used by businesses to migrate data, enable users to sign on, and increase integration with previously existing systems. Google will also be adding BlackBerry access for email use.

There are currently more than 100,000 businesses using the free version of the program, but Google says it intends to target businesses and universities Microsoft, IBM or Oracle may be serving already. "We have a volume goal ... for millions and millions of users," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a phone interview with Reuters. "While big-business buying cycles will take time, we have lots of indications of very large deals."

The object, however, is not necessarily to dig into Microsoft's already-prodigious market share. But Schmidt feels that Google has more to offer than Microsoft Live. "We can offer a more functional product for a lower price," he said.

One potential downside, according to Robert Whiteside, is that the usefulness of the new system is entirely reliant on a company's broadband access. "The network is always a point of failure."