Google’s G-Mail and APPs Strategy Gets an A-: By Dr. Harsh K. Luthar

On August 29, 2006, I stated the following on Google’s APPs strategy and gave advice on what they needed to do.

“Google needs to follow Microsoft’s lead in offering its own premium services for a fee to add another dimension to its ad based revenue model. Google has indicated that it will indeed release a fee-based version of its service aimed at larger companies offering more data storage and technical support. Hey, but what about me Google? I am not a large company but I would like Google’s premium service and I would be willing to pay for it.”

“… So why is it that Google is not offering its premium services to loyal customers that want it? Why should Google’s premium service be only reserved for large enterprises? What would Google have to lose by having a two tiered structure of services like Microsoft does. Premium and Regular. They certainly would have a lot to gain. First, it is potentially another way to generate revenues independent of the ad based model. Second, having satisfied customers with increasing good will for Google is going to add to their future success.”

For the complete article, please see Google Should Diversify Its Strategy

Almost a year after I made the recommendations on strategy, Google indeed expanded its premium services to individuals. I assume that Google’s strategy to offer premium services to individual users must have already been in the works last year when I wrote my post. Either that or someone at Google read my blog and probably thought that it was a pretty reasonable request and easy to comply with.

So to test the new Google service, I paid my 50 bucks a year fee and got a Google Apps Premier Edition account and have been playing with it a bit.

Here are some things I noticed.

1. I was expecting to get 10 Gigabytes of storage in my premium G-mail account. However, when I look at my brand new G-mail Inbox, I am getting the following message.

“You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 25600 MB.”

Evidently, Google has increased the storage available to their Premier Edition users to 25 Gigabytes. Great!

2. Overall, I am pretty happy with the Google docs and like the flexibility it gives me to access documents and spreadsheets from any computer with an Internet connection. The collaboration features allowing mutliple authors to edit documents from various places of the world are a boon to international scholars, researchers, professors, students, and others involved in group projects.

3. However, while Google docs can read Word 2003 files, and store them, it does not seem compatible with Word 2007. Evidently, the new .docx formats from Office 2007 cannot be read by Google docs. I have gotten over this problem by using the feature in Word 2007 that allows for saving a Word document in the old .doc format in Word 97-2003. Saving a Word document in this format allows it to be read by Google docs.

4. In order to have secure Google Apps or G-mail sessions one has to be alert and not use HTTP but HTTPS access only via https://mail.google.com/a/. Unfortunately, many organizations have users who are not tech savvy and will not remember to use HTTPS. If security of data and having encrypted e-mail is critical for a company, there may be some reluctance in using Google APPs. Google needs a simple solution to this issue which forces the use of HTTPS for their Premier Edition users automatically.

Of course, having HTTPS and a secure connection on all the time is more expensive in processing power and may slow things down a bit on the Google servers. Perhaps that is a challenge. On the other hand, this is a reasonable expectation on part of the paying customers of the Google Apps Premier Editon.

To their credit, Google management just bought security software maker Postini. It’s clear that Google will be adding more security features to Google APPs Premier Edition making it attractive to both corporate customers and individual users.

Security on the Internet is a very high priority today and users will pay a premium for it. Overall, I would have to give Google APPs strategy a high grade of A-. Not perfect but pretty good and headed in the right direction.