Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) expanded its Google Apps service in a huge way this week. The productivity suite for businesses, governments, and schools suddenly expanded from a handful of tools to more than 60, all configurable by your plan administrator and at the same price as before.
Is Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) shaking in its boots yet? Google clearly wants to kill the Office suite.
To that end, this upgrade is perhaps not a major weapon but certainly a selling point. Your small business may not care that Google Apps added centralized support for the Picasa image sharing service, but setting up a few companywide tracking portfolios in Google Finance sounds great. Or perhaps you'd like the information-sharing options afforded by Apps now including the Google Reader news tracker tool. Or maybe you need the instant cloud-computing power of the AppEngine. It's all there. Microsoft can't match this kind of end-to-end supported access to tools in the cloud, most of which are backed by Google's 99.9% uptime guarantee and all of them having passed the SAS70 security audit process (but not ISO 27001, natch!).
So Google looked at its Apps services and added a long tail to the picture. Nobody will care about all of the newly available tools, but a lot of potential customers will find something new to get excited about. The third-party tools sold in the Google Apps Marketplace (yes, kind of like the Android Market or Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone market, but for cloud application plugins rather than phone-bound apps) currently only integrate with the old and much smaller set of core Google services but should gain access to most or all of the additions one of these days.
Are you excited about Blogger, AdSense, or the ghost of Google Wave making it into the fully supported Apps suite? Is it enough to move you over from a Microsoft Office or IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Lotus Notes environment? More importantly, can you see hordes of customers flocking to Google Apps thanks to this change? Discuss these key considerations in the comments below.
