Google takes yet another step in its battle against Microsoft for domination of the corporate environment.
The software giant has recently released a set of APIs which will make migration from a Microsoft/any-other-system-you-may-use to Gmail incredibly simple.
“We’ve provided developer documentation and sample code that allows developers to build extremely sophisticated mail migration tools, some of which can be run by administrators to migrate centralized mail and some of which can be run by end-users to migrate mail from the desktop,” — Gabe Cohen, Google Apps product manager.
I couldn’t find any data about the usage of Google documents around. I expect the uptake of the application to be extremely high among non-corporate users. However, It seems that it will take a bit longer for small businesses and startups to get used to the service and start using it. Especially considering that most users have been educated in a Microsoft-ruled environment their entire professional life.
Google had previously released another set of tools to allow users and system administrators to migrate from most IMAP-based e-mail systems to Google Gmail.
Furthermore, as much as this set of APIs is a very interesting development, I hardly see a big corporation spending a considerable amount of dough and development time to migrate its entire system, similarly it’s going to be even harder for small business find the time and money to dedicate to this. Don’t take me to seriously now though. Companies like Capgemini, with 80,000 employees are in fact putting a first toe in the water and using Google Apps for some of its employees.
Nevertheless I’m sure all sort of open-source/free applications will sprout all over the internet to let disgruntled Outlook users switch to Gmail.
