As anticipated, Google finally released a commercial version of Google Apps. For $50 per user and per year, you get 10 GB of storage per account (instead of the 2.82 GB currently offered with free accounts), shared calendar resources, APIs, support, and a couple other things, which are described in details on this page. So let’s take a look at what this release really means for the Office 2.0 movement in general, and Office 2.0 workers in particular.

First and foremost, it means that Google is dead serious about Office 2.0. Among the plethora of services currently offered by the company, very few have commercial versions today, and most never will. Asking people to pay for a service is a lot harder than giving it away for free, for it requires a complete billing infrastructure, alongside human beings ready to pick up the phone when paying customers need some help. More than any other company in the space, Google has been very modest in rolling out new commercial offerings, and did so only when it could demonstrate an ironclad business model for it. Google Apps is one of them, and it serves as a fantastic validation for the Office 2.0 movement. And this validation should only help the other players in the space, as the good Zoho folks justly pointed out on their blog today.

Then, it confirms a trend that we have seen developing over the past six to nine months regarding business models: give a standard edition away for free, then release a premier edition that gives you more capacity, more features, better integration, and better support, all for a reasonable monthly or yearly fee. What is particularly interesting with Google’s spin on the model is that it offers APIs with the premier edition only, and I think this is a very smart move. Corporate customers from both SMBs and larger enterprises are the ones who really need single sign-on, user provisioning and management, and support for email gateways, which makes the premier edition a very appealing upgrade. Byt the same token, all the other features that make Google Apps so attractive, such as mobile access, remain available with the standard edition. Smart move, very smart move…

What is more surprising is that access to 3rd party applications and services is limited to the premier edition. Personally, I think it’s a mistake. Google is trying to build a platform with Google Apps, and the success of a platform is measured by its adoption by developers of 3rd party applications, as discussed in this earlier article. Problem is, developers won’t adopt your platform if they cannot get access to a large community of users. This catch 22 is a very challenging one to get out of, and the only way to solve it is to lower all possible barriers to adoption. This is something that Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com understood very well, and the reason why all Salesforce.com users get access to the vast majority of applications currently offered on the AppExchange, irrespectively of the edition they subscribe to. My advice to Google would be the following: open up your platform to all developers and all users, and share some of your premier services, such as billing and user provisioning, with 3rd party developers. Doing so, you will encourage developers to adopt your platform, and you might even be able to get a cut of their business with your premier customers.

Now, what does this mean for Office 2.0 workers? To start, you get more storage capacity. I described ways to work around Gmail’s quota in a past article, but quite frankly, the solutions I came up with are not entirely satisfying. As of today, I reached 89% of my 2820 MB allowance on my free Gmail account, and this is getting quite uncomfortable. If my usage patterns remain the same (5.53 MB of daily emails), a 10 GB account should be enough for about 5 years. And two factors should make it enough for virtually anyone: First, I would expect Google to increase quotas slightly faster than our needs grow, just because they can. Second, Office 2.0 promotes a collaboration model whereby documents are shared rather than sent as email attachments, thereby reducing the volume of emails you need to store. In other words, we are reaching a land of plenty, where storage becomes a commodity that we do not have to worry about anymore. I don’t know about you, but I kinda like that.

Another impact of Google’s announcement on Office 2.0 workers is that Google Apps will more and more become a viable option for a lot of corporate customers. As a result, this will increase the need for integration with other services currently used by the same community of users, Salesforce.com being first among them. Yesterday’s article asking readers to share their experiences migrating to an Office 2.0 environment made it pretty clear that integration between email, calendar, and contact manager is paramount among the things that need to be fixed, and I cannot think of a better place to start than where Google Apps and Salesforce.com intersect. This is one of the things that my friend Charlie Wood at Spanning Sync is trying to get done, and I just cannot wait for it to go GA.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which is a critical part of the Google Apps offering, was announced at the Office 2.0 Conference back in October 11, 2006. That was just four and a half months before Google released Google Apps. If this new release tells us anything, it is that everything is moving very fast in the Office 2.0 world, and that we should have a pretty fun ride ahead of us. Rock on!