Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Message Continuity, powered by Postini This sounds to me like step one of a three step process:
One – get people to integrate their Microsoft Exchange servers, which represent the overwhelming majority of corporate e-mail/calendar/contact servers in use (I arrive at this scientific conclusion because every company I have ever worked for has used Microsoft Exchange).
Two – get the employees to see how easy and fun it is to access all their e-mails and appointments via Gmail in web browser from any computer, tablet, or mobile phone rather than firing up their laptop, connecting to the VPN, and opening Outlook just to find your co-worker’s phone number or confirm if a meeting was 9am or 11am. Employees will even start doing this when they’re in the office since even Internet Explorer loads faster than Outlook these days.
Three – get the companies to switch over entirely to Google Apps, at least for their e-mail, now that no one is bothering to open Outlook at all ever!
Of course the selling point is the money the company will save by mitigating outages from maintenance and failures. And it’s oh so magnanimous of Google to be taking the continuity of our business to heart. But lets be realistic, the real objective here is to squish the king of e-mail – Microsoft Exchange/Outlook – like a bug hitting the wind shield of a Bugatti going 200 MPH!
Cross-posted on Schultzter’s blog at Official Google Blog: Introducing Google Message Continuity, powered by Postini