Google Apps … I like it!
The concept is simple. You have a 1-N person company and have the domain www.mystartup.com. You want to provide all your employees with basic email, Instant Messaging, Calendaring etc. capabilities. All of the above can be bought or set up in some ad-hoc manner. But this is where Google Apps comes in. It gives you all the above and more for free (at least initially… till they come out with premium services for which you would have to pay for). Not that you can’t already have all these services ala carte but with Google Apps you get a admin interface through which you can administer your users. You can set your own custom logo for all the services, time zone, color schemes etc. Not only that all your employees get the services with the mystartup.com domain. Here’s a screenshot:
This is an excellent way to increase usage of services like GMail, Gtalk etc. which otherwise may not gain as much traction. I can imagine companies that buy domains/hosting space from dreamhost or godaddy making use of this service. Better still I can imagine the ISP’s or hosting providers giving users the option to use Google Apps in a much more out of the box fashion. So for example instead of using the slow and old squirrel mail interface I use, dreamhost would offer me a gmail interface. This is a win win for Google since the gmail text ads are highly targeted and may make enough money to keep writely and spreadsheets ad free for a long time (or forever?) to come. One thing that also caught my eye was the capability to create mailing lists. This is an extremely useful (and painful to manage) function most companies like to have.
Now there are concerns about doing office work like composing documents and excel sheets online, since you can’t edit or access all this data on the plane or when not connected to the internet. There are 2 things that are going to solve this problem or alleviate it to a certain extent. One being that internet is going to be omnipresent in the not so distant future. Here again Google is making some impressive strides. The other solution path which till this point hasn’t received much attention is one wherein some or all of the data can be stored permanently or temporarily on the client side itself and somehow kept in sync with the central servers. Dogo.Storage and JavaDB come to my mind in this context. There is no doubt in my mind that the big Web2.0 players are already trying ti come up with solutions to this daunting problem.
All in all give 2 thumbs up to Google Apps!
