Tags: Microsoft

Google Apps Premier Edition coming up!

Google is likely to soon launch the commercial version of their Google Apps service suite. This suite would include e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management and would put it in direct competition to established players like Microsoft and IBM.

This suite is also being launched at the time when Microsoft has just launched the latest version of their Office productivity suite MS Office 2007.

Sources say that this software bundle is likely to be sold for a $50 annual fee per user. AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy spoke about this initiative from the search engine giant: “This is just the beginning. The real impact of what Google is trying to do probably won’t be evident for another five years.”

The free version of this suite Google Apps has already been available since the last couple of months. The company already has a subscriber base of 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities who are using this free service.

The paid version would come with five times more e-mail storage (10 GB per email account) and Google guarantees that the service would be available 99.9 percent of the time with around-the-clock technical support. The company would also provide email access on mobile device.

However, feature wise Google Docs and Spreadsheets are no comparison to MS Office’s Word and Excel applications.