Read the articles here.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article1421520.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article1423608.ece
Here's the Google Apps site. http://www.google.com/a
Google will launch an assault on one of Microsoft’s biggest earners today when
it unveils its first suite of paid-for office tools.
For $50 (£26) a year per user, Google Apps Premier Edition will offer
corporate customers a bundle of web-based applications including e-mail, a
word processor and a spreadsheet. It will compete with Microsoft’s Office,
which includes the software stalwarts Word and Excel...
...
Google added that its own 10,000 employees have been using its system for
several months, although as recently as October most of them were using
Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail service. Robert Whiteside, head of enterprise
services at Google UK, said: “We have been eating our own dogfood.”
What makes this work, of course, is that Google has a kajillion units of storage space for rent, and most people have high-speed. (My parents in Montana with their seeminly 1k dialup could no more use Google spreadsheets than they could pull bricks out of walls with their bare hands.)
There is also a wide-open space for just a freakin' simple application with fewer features but the right features. If I were a programmer, I would create a cut-down simpler version of OpenOffice.org. (I know I can modify the toolbars and menus, but you can't delete menus that are already there.)
I haven't checked out the new site yet, though I do use Google Spreadsheets to tracks lists of things I need to access from multiple locations.