Google has fewer than 1m paying users for its Google Apps service, and it has clearly decided that the time has come to get more serious about turning this into a mainstream business tool.
That is the conclusion to be drawn from today’s move to bring Gmail and three other apps out of their official test phase (finally). The beta designation has been a running joke for much of the five-plus years of Gmail’s life: after all, the company claims tens of millions of consumer users for individual applications like Gmail and Google Docs, along with another 15m or so students and workers who use a free version of the full suite of Apps, so the test period is clearly long over.
Yet the number of paying subscribers still only numbers in the “hundreds of thousands”, according to a spokesperson.
Google doesn’t offer any specific reason for bringing the applications out of beta, other than to say that the designation can be off-putting to corporate IT departments that typically shy away from technology that is still being put through its paces. So much for the company’s vaunted engineering-driven culture: when business needs take precedence, marketing convenience clearly wins out.
There have been other signs recently that Google’s famously lengthy patience widely-used services that don’t pay their way is starting to wear thin. In one of its most direct pitches to paying corporate customers, Google last month launched a tool for syncing its Apps with Microsoft’s Outlook software – yet that particular technology wasn’t ready for prime time and brought howls of complaint from Microsoft when it had the side-effect of getting in the way of the desktop search capability built into Windows.
Google’s new pitch to the IT department makes sense. Many workers already use services like Gmail at home and are perfectly happy to extend that to their working lives – in fact, in many cases would rather do so than be forced to use versions of desktop applications that are in many cases years old, given the length of time it takes IT departments to upgrade.
Also, with Microsoft about to embark on one of its toughest periodic challenges – trying to persuade business users to upgrade to another new version of Office when the existing one seems good enough for most purposes – this is a good time for Google to dust off its own marketing pitch. A flat $50 per user annual fee sounds even better when you don’t have to upgrade software on thousands of desktops and train workers to use a new software package.
Meanwhile, the Gmail team may have the last laugh. Even today they are still offering users the option of sticking the “beta” label back on their Gmail service. Just for old time’s sake.
