Interesting little tidbit from Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google’s enterprise business in this News.com piece. In the article, which discusses the hosting of various web applications by Google for external parties, there’s a mention of for-pay, premium services:
A premium edition with support and additional storage will be available by the end of the year for a fee, Girouard said. He declined to provide more details.
Vague, I’ll grant you, but one of the first concrete signs that Google may in fact expand its horizons beyond purely ad based revenue. I’ve speculated on this possibility before, saying:
What’s the catch? Well, as Ian learned recently, you’d apparently have to be a “dipshit” to trust free services with “CRUCIAL” data (apparently your personal emails and such aren’t crucial). While I don’t buy that argument at all, nor do I fully trust services that I’m not paying for. That, more than any other reason, is why I believe Google ultimately will roll out for-pay services: folks like me are more than willing to pay for them, if the price is right.
That notion has been the subtext to many, if not most of the conversations I’ve had about the possibility of seeing a Google Office offering emerge. It’s too early to say, based on the one flip comment above, whether the “Premium edition” is a foreshadowing of Google Office, or indeed Google Office itself, but the possibility is certainly an interesting one.
More importantly, the implications of a for pay suite of products that’s web based – even one that has less than 20% of the features from, say, Microsoft Office/Exchange/etc – are potentially profound as Zack notes here.
