It's no secret that Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is trying to undermine Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) software business at every turn. Although Google continues to be non-chalant about it, the company's "software as a service" approach to competing with Microsoft's established "software on your PC approach" is popular in many circles, but still doesn't seem to be affecting Microsoft's revenue stream.Microsoft's Windows Vista is the pre-installed operating system on almost every PC sold in the world, and its corporate selling of the Microsoft Office package continues to be one of the company's cash cows, even with similar competitive software given away for free. One of Microsoft's corporate staples is its Exchange Server product, which lets all those installations of Outlook on millions of business desktops access company email. What if all those copies of Outlook could be using email, calendaring and contact management from Google's freely available Gmail service?
Cemaphore Systems might have your answer, and this could very well be the tip of the iceberg for small companies tired of maintaining an Exchange Service -- and tired of paying a decent chunk of change for it as well. Google's Gmail service, after all, is completely free to use. The company's product -- MailShadow -- lets your email service be Gmail (even with your own domain name, of course).
Outlook software on all those employees desks would connect to Google's Gmail service sitting on the internet rather than that Exchange email server sitting in a server room in the company somewhere. The trade-off is giving control over company email to Google instead of managing it internally with your own server. But, would some corporate customers be willing to trade that for a freely-available email, contacts and calendaring service managed by Google? Microsoft sure hopes not.
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