Thursday, February 22, 2007

Its the GOOGs again..

The secret now finally has open with Google announcing that it will charge a fee of $50 for its online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management. Labelled as Google Apps Premier Edition, it provides a 10 GB / account for emails and 99.9% uptime guarantee for the same. So the advantage offered above its free edition is a 5 fold increase of the email storage capacity. Further, it also provides APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure - i.e. Organizations that already maintain a user directory can use the Google Apps Premier Edition APIs to automatically keep their user accounts in sync across systems. Now that is a huge plus that comes for the $50 prices that you pay.

The timing however, perhaps couldn't have been better, with Microsoft Corp. spending a fortune trying to persuade even the animals(damn.. k its an exaggeration) to buy their Vista edition with the revamped Outlook (personally I didn't like it though) et al.

However, documents and applications making use of online storage are yet to generate mass acceptance because they entail with them a huge dependability factor - the availability of internet. With memory getting cheaper by the hour, the only advantage that online storage provides is that they are accessible from almost any location - provided you've got the 3 w's runnin'..

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