Google has released a free one-stop interface for hosted web-based services for businesses. To simplify: Businesses can sign up to get Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Page Creator, hosted on their domains and controlled by a single administrative interface. In the future, ready-for-primetime applications would be added to “Google Apps For Your Domain” (easily the worst Google product name for a service that is supposed to be hugely important), and Google would charge for expanded services.
The buzz seems to be that Google wants to create the ever-elusive internet operating system / office suite that Microsoft has long feared. Adding other Google products like Writely, Spreadsheet and god knows what else, could create a certain amount of reliance and lock-in to Google products, and wean companies off of Microsft Office and Windows. For now, it is mostly an extension of Gmail For Your Domain (which explains where it inherited the awful name).
Gmail, Calendar and Talk make for some useful tools for companies, but the inclusion of Page Creator is a strange one. Until now, Page Creator appeared to be little more than a side project, but if Google is including it in such an important package, they must be planning to continue to support and expand it. In its current form, I can’t imagine many companies relying on Page Creator for their websites, especially since you only get to create a single, Google-hosted start page.
While GAFYD (got a better acronym? GAYD?) may be hyped to take on Microsoft Office, its real competition is Microsoft Office Live, which offers Windows Live Mail (up to 50 accounts), an incredibly advanced web-based page creator, free domain names, web analytics, 50 megabytes of web space and 25 gigabytes of transfer bandwidth, calendaring, asset tracking, To Do lists, document storage, employee management applications, customer management applications, project management, sales and marketing tools, shared collaborative workspaces, and other features. So while Google’s release will no doubt get more press today, it has a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft’s, which is also free.
A few other things: While GAFYD is free in beta, it may cost money in the future. If so, those who signed up in beta would continue to get it for free, although for how long is not clear. There’s also Google Apps for Education, which is basically the exact same thing, minus Page Creator. All personalized start pages are located at “http://partnerpage.google.com/ig/your_domain_name
“; you can’t change that and you can’t have more than one.
Some coverage:
Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch calls it “more fluff”, and agrees that it competes more with Office Live or Windows Live Essentials than Microsoft Office.
Dvorak says “I hope they give Microsoft a run for their money” and “The question is, will Google become the new monopolists?”
John Battelle says Google is emailing Search Appliance customers to invite them to try the new package.