Google has announced their Premier Edition aimed at small businesses and Fortune 500 companies.

The applications included in the suite include Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Start Page.

The benefits for the Premier Edition users are API’s to integrate with existing infrastructure, 24/7 assistance including phone support (that means actual humans will talk to you from Google! gasp!), 3rd party applications and services, 10GB storage, the option to turn off Ads in your email among others.

The cost is $50 per user per year.

I guess that now Google has begun to charge for something else apart from their Adwords program, you can expect their earnings and stock price to increase.

Does this effect Microsoft’s other main offering of Office?
Well it might as the price is significantly cheaper and online apps seem to be catching on. Concerning security some companies might be vary as there have been known holes, that were fixed, and of course Gmail still holds that beta tag.

I think this a move by Google to get it’s product used by more people and to make it better. How do you make it better? by doing what they just did deploying it for the business world so that they can report back (by phone) with all kinds of kinks and loose screws. The more feedback they get the better the software becomes.

Of course here instead of buying a whole new upgrade package like Office 2007 you just wait for Google to update their algorithms, UI’s, software etc…and the upgrade is done, plus the price stays the same (so far). Also you don’t need to worry about your hardware requirements being out of date as there is nothing to install.

Technorati Tags: google, web apps, gmail, web 2.0

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.