Doubts grow over the visibility of free Google Apps

Tuesday 07 July 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Speculation that Google had abandoned its free model of Google Apps in a recession-crunching move to promote its paid-for version has been refuted by the Mountain View giant.

Google Apps – a dynamic suite that combines popular Google business products such as Gmail, Google Talk and Google Calendar in a free package that requires no software installation – was launched back in August 2006.

Soon afterwards, Google launched Google Apps Premier, an advertising-free, paid subscription service that, at a mere $50 per year, dramatically undercut Microsoft. Not surprisingly, Google Apps Premier was snapped up by large multinationals including General Electric, L'Oréal and Procter and Gamble.

In a post yesterday on the weblog TechCrunch, Michael Arrington flagged up the fact that Google appeared to have ditched the free version. His article – entitled 'What The Hell Happened To The Free Version Of Google Apps?' – pointed out that the landing page for Google Apps no longer offered the free option. Users could take up a free trial period but after that, it seemed, would have to pay the premier rate of $50 per annum. This meant that Google Apps, argued Arrington, was no longer the product which Google once described as "a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes".

Such a move would mean nothing in most corporate circles but Google has long prided itself on its 'freeconomics' or 'freemium' business philosophy and so rumours were immediately rife that the greater profitability of the subscription-based model was required by Google in response to the global recession. According to Google's own figures, the vast majority of the 1 million businesses that use Google Apps opt for the free, advertising-supported version. Certainly Google has recently been employing various tactics – notably, reducing the number of user accounts available in the free version from 200 users down to just 50 – in order to tempt more businesses to choose the premier suite.

In response to the TechCrunch article, a Google spokesperson said, "In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion."

All this comes hard on the heels of Google's announcement to remove the beta label from its Google Apps. On the official Google Blog yesterday, Matthew Glotzbach (Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise) posted the news that Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk will no longer carry what has been dubbed by some as the 'beta tag of shame'.

In his post, Glotzbach admits, "We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta. For example, Gmail has worn the beta tag more than five years. We realize this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of 'beta' software as not being yet ready for prime time."

Over 1.75 million companies around the world run their businesses on Google Apps – including, of course, Google itself. Paying customers will continue to be provided with a 99.9 per cent service agreement now that the products are out of beta – the same level of service Google agreed to provide while they were in beta! So what's it all about?

Glotzbach explained, "We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase." He went on to say that the corporation was also announcing some other Google Apps features that would appeal to large enterprises – namely, "mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability".

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