Google Apps

Interesting story about Arizona State University’s decision to deploy Google Apps. They partnered with Google’s Enterprise Solutions Division to provide email, instant messaging, search, calendar, word processing and spreadsheets to roughly 40,000 students and faculty.

The article claims that the cost to the university was zero dollars. I suspect that there were some costs associated with provisioning access to all of these services. However, software as a service can be delivered as a commodity offering.

Should be interesting to see where this goes. Could desktop productivity software move to the web? Secure and available 24/7? Free?

Maybe that Microsoft stock will never go up.