The Future is Cloudy
When Google this week announced IMAP support for Gmail, it really got me thinking about finally outsourcing my e-mail. At $50 per year per address, Google Apps Premier Edition is pretty compelling. For one thing, there are only three cringely.com addresses …
Context & Ripple Effects
This column lands at the end of a two-year arc in which Google assembled a credible alternative to running your own mail server. It started with Google Apps' embedded-functionality play in August 2006, then Google bought an e-mail management company in July 2007, adding the compliance and security layer that business customers said hosted Gmail lacked.
The adoption engine was already visible by that summer, when Gmail was driving Google Apps uptake on college campuses. What changed this week is technical rather than commercial: confirmed IMAP support means Gmail finally syncs properly with Outlook, Thunderbird, and phones instead of forcing users into the web interface. That single protocol addition is what makes Cringely's math work — three cringely.com addresses at $50 per year each under Google Apps Premier Edition versus maintaining his own mail infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Small domain owners and consultants weighing hosted e-mail lose their main technical objection: with IMAP confirmed, Gmail-based mail behaves like traditional server mail across desktop clients and mobile devices, making the $50-per-address Premier Edition a direct substitute for self-hosting.
- Google Apps Premier Edition gains credibility with exactly the skeptical power-user audience that had dismissed webmail as non-professional, at essentially no incremental cost to Google since the infrastructure already runs Gmail.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's Exchange-hosting partners face price competition from a $50/year per-seat offering backed by the Postini acquisition, pushing them to compete on migration services, compliance tooling, and support rather than raw mailbox cost.
- IT resellers and managed-service providers who billed for maintaining small-office mail servers see that line of work commoditized, and must either resell Google Apps or move up the stack to integration work.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, e-mail completes its shift from a product you administer (Exchange servers, POP accounts) to a subscription you consume, with open protocols like IMAP serving as the trust mechanism that lets customers leave their old systems without fear of lock-in.
- The broader structural consequence is that application suites follow mail into the browser-first, per-seat-priced model Google sketched with Apps in 2006 — turning the office-software market into a contest over who hosts the data, not who sells the licenses.
The trend: Business e-mail is migrating from self-administered servers to per-seat cloud subscriptions, with standards support like IMAP acting as the gatekeeper that convinces holdouts to outsource.