Google Apps free offer gets 1 month extension. Why?
By Vivek | April 25th, 2007 at 10:39 pm ET
While we are at talking about Office20, let’s look at a small change. When Google had announced pricing for Google Apps Premier earlier this year in February, companies were free to try out the Google Apps Premier till April 30th, 2007. Well, as it seems right now, that date got pushed to May 31st. Not really sure what is the reason behind the change. Is Google having issues with meeting it’s growth targets for the paid edition? Or Google was expecting way too many companies to jump the ship that never happened for real.
Either way Google Apps has tough times ahead with BungeeLabs offering super-cheap pay-as-you-go pricing of $1/interaction-hour for it’s hosted apps platform that among other things can easily have the mail/doc/spreadsheet built through it in no time. Not sure how the $50/user/year pricing from Google would matchup to Bungee’s offer. More on Bungee soon.
on April 26th, 2007 at 2:58 am
Almost all of the revenue from Office comes from bundles and enterprise sales, and we’re a long way from Google seeing any revenue from either of these. The apps just aren’t good enough for large enterprises to standardize on them, and without offline capability, there’s just no way mobile professionals will use them yet.
Instead of making office app clones, it’s much more interesting to determine how people are using spreadsheets and word processors, and come up with more custom built solutions. Then, you don’t have to directly compete with Office. In this regard, companies like BungeeLabs sound more interesting.
This isn’t to say that they won’t eventually gain traction, but it’s a long way off, and the market will probably evolve significantly before we get to that point. Like most Google ‘Apps’, they’re technologically interesting, but are still a ways from being good businesses.
on April 27th, 2007 at 9:17 am
Google is offering the additional extension based on a commitment around SLA they made a few months back. They basically said that if they didn’t meet the SLA, you would get free service. Soon after the launch, there was a short interruption in service, so being the good guys that they are, they gave all of us apps premier customers an additional month. I applaud Google for their efforts!
on April 30th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
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