Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Staying with the theme of the WWW being a candidate for the business operating system of the future, let’s look at a quick overview of the major business-style applications that Google has available on the Web today: the Google Apps Premier Edition. They may be just an inkling of what the future has to bring us in the way of business applications on the Web.

Of course, there are a few issues that need to be addressed first. There are security issues to be consider if your storage is to be on line. How safe is that storage, and how can you be sure no one else can access it? Would you be willing to store your sensitive corporate information on a Google server? No, me neither, not right now. They are going to have to figure some way around this problem. It would also be handy if it was possible to work offline with your information, only if temporarily. And, truth be told, these applications may not yet be ready from prime time.

We know it can be done. Open Office has coded a great MS Office replacement, and taken it from less than Google has now to a full-blown implementation fairly quickly. We probably also need a way to make Web apps look and work more like local apps, but I have a feeling that Google and others are working on that. It may just be a matter of time. This is a very recent trend.

The plan, as I understand it, would be to charge $50 per year per business user. If you’re a small business with ten computerized employees, that’s $500, less than the cost of two MS Office licenses. I would guess that if you were IBM, they would make you a deal. At this point, they don’t have near enough applications (or good enough applications) to make many users sign up. All they offer is mail, IM, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and a Web page creation app.

None of these are even close to the standards established by either MS Office or Open Office, but we know the kinds of things of which Google is capable. They are already in the small OS business, with a phone operating system. What’s to stop them from building a new Web-based OS? Honestly, for a company with Google’s resources, coding up an office suite should be a piece of cake. If they can solve the security of storage issue, I would guess they will be off to the races.