This Isn't Your Daddy's Gmail

[Editor's Note: In a departure from form, I will mostly blog shorter posts today. It's a stylistic experiment; please offer feedback in comments or by e-mail.]

Today, my eWEEK colleague Clint Boulton explains how through iterations Google is making Gmail more enterprise-ready. He's absolutely right, as usual. Clint writes:

For those of you who haven't dusted off your Gmail account in awhile, please do so now. You may well not recognize it from when it was launched in 2004 by invitation only. Google has jazzed up the application to the point where it is more of a personal productivity tool for businesses than it is a consumer communications app.

But his early examples are features that don't much differ from those found in Windows Live Hotmail, such as calendaring. What differs: how Google is turning Gmail into an informational hub for all productivity and communications. Think of it as Outlook for the Web, but with much less baggage.

I recall beta testing Outlook v1 in 1996, ahead of Office 97's release. Aside from the heavy forms integration, Outlook's core features were streamlined like Gmail was in 2004. Outlook was a huge product for Microsoft because of the sales pull created by and for Exchange Server. More than a decade later, Outlook is Microsoft's productivity hub, although there is increasingly shifting emphasis to SharePoint. In so many ways, Outlook is on the desktop what Gmail is becoming on the Web.

"If you were able to access all of your Google Apps from Gmail, wouldn't you be inclined to make Gmail your home page?" Clint asks. That's a scary question for Microsoft, where executives know that many business users live in Outlook on the desktop. My guess: Microsoft's forthcoming Office Web is more response to Gmail than to Google Apps or Docs.

What happens if in the future Google ties some features to Chrome? Hypothetical: Gmail is good with Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari but great with Google Chrome. I promise you that even if Google never does this, there are Microsoft executives fretting about it and planning a response. Then there are Android-based phones, which are single-sign-in ready for Gmail and bundled productivity and communications features.

The bigger differentiator I see—what should scare Microsoft executives poopless—is modularity. Google expands Gmail without adding the kind of overhead that slows down Outlook on the desktop. Google's design approach is smartly streamlined. The end user chooses to add this or that, and the choices just get better. In June, Google launched Gmail Labs, which throws out lots of new Gmail capabilities and refinements. The Gmail user decides what or when, if ever.

Outlook is Office's anchor. Secondary one: Excel. Strange that Outlook doesn't come with the Office Ribbon. The UI isn't that much different from Gmail. Plenty of users, even businesses, use Web-based e-mail. Microsoft's success with Hotmail is evidence enough. Gmail is showing ways that Outlook is vulnerable to customer poaching to Gmail, which is free.

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