Google to Start Charging for Google Apps
Interestingly, Google may be trying out a new business model soon. Currently, Google makes bucket loads of cash by selling advertising on its applications and affiliate networks. However, here is a move to change its primarily advertising-based model into a subscription-based model. Here is the story from ArsTechnica.
The original goal of Google Apps for Your Domain was to present simpler service options for small companies that don’t necessarily have the time or resources to pour into setting up more robust enterprise apps, such as a Microsoft Exchange server or Lotus Notes. The package allowed for server administrators to completely customize them under the company’s own branding, making Google Apps look more like the company’s own start page and e-mail. “Organizations can let Google be the experts in delivering high quality email, messaging, and other web-based services while they focus on the needs of their users and their day-to-day business,” said Google VP Dave Girouard when the service package launched last August.
But it’s not just small companies who have been champing at the bit to make use of Google’s services, as organizations such as Disney, Pixar, and the University of Arizona are eager to sign up to have hundreds of thousands of accounts managed online by Google. The service was offered for free to businesses during Google Apps’ beta period, but will apparently be going live with subscriptions “in the coming weeks,” according to BusinessWeek. It’s still murky as to how much Google will charge organizations for the service, but the fee will reportedly amount to “a few dollars per person per month.”
It is good of Google to start diversifying their revenue streams. There are some who worry that Google’s foray into another untested revenue model might distract them from improving on their existing one. This, in turn, might leave an opening for other competitors to flood in. GSM operators are even plotting to leave no room for Google on the Mobile Search space.
Apparently the Brits and other European wireless telco carriers want to drop the bomb on Yank mobile search engines like Yahoo! and Google — so much that Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and, gasp, America’s Cingular are plotting to try and supplant the mobile search services of Google and Yahoo! from their customer’s handsets.
In the end, advertising or subscription, this is still in-line with Google’s vision of “Running everything on Google” and “All your data belong to Google”.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:12 am
[…] We are definitely beginning to see signs of what a possible new world wide web order will look like. This new WWW order is categorized by the increase in traditional desktop applications being offered in the Internet using Web 2.0 technologies. A WWW beyond content. With the release of Google Apps, we have seen the gradual movement of office productivity (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation) into the web. […]