Google Apps has seen good but not crazy growth in the enterprise because as with most early products, its feature set is good but not great as compared to the incumbent Microsoft suite.
Many of us have been willing to bite the feature bullet to move the care and feeding of Outlook and Exchange to the cloud and specifically Google because we smaller businesses do not have the time or patience to manage Exchange and Outlook on our own. True, MSFT has moved O/E to the Cloud as well calling it Azure, but the move of the enterprise to Google Apps is growing.
According to a recent Network World survey, government organizations rated their intended usage of Google Apps by 2011 at 2.70 (heavy) and of Azure 4.13 (practically nonexistent) while enterprises weighed in at 3.03. while they ranked their planned Azure usage at 3.48 (1 being heaviest, 5 being least).
What will make this movement even faster is Buzz. IMHO Buzz is the missing ingredient, the secret weapon, that will cause enterprises to move to Google Apps and Gmail in droves. Here is why:
- Ease of adoption. Many, many corporate users use Gmail for their personal email account. Learning costs will be very low to move to enterprise Gmail.
- Ease of use. Buzz is seamless integrated into Gmail and leverages much of the same experience found in streams UI of Twitter and FB.
- Buzz is the perfect workgroup product. Its the ultimate knowledgeware product. The walled garden nature of enterprise Google Apps is ideal for Buzz. Buzz allows you to share information with the people you are already talking to in the enterprise with a first order level of security from the outside world. No need to send email blasts or maintain gmail group lists to communicate valuable and real-time info. Of course, there will need to be sub groups so that private info is not shared indiscriminately, but I am sure Google has thought about that as well.
Ryan Spoon has articulated many of the benefits of Buzz here . No need to re-state the obvious features he sees, but the really big idea is that it could become the ideal workgroup product for corporations. A killer feature that could drive even more corps to Google Apps.
