First-order effects

• Enterprise attendees at Atmosphere get a direct signal that Google intends to keep investing in Apps' collaborative core — sharing framed as the hardest engineering problem, not a feature checkbox — which strengthens the suite's credibility against per-seat incumbents.
• The pitch lands the same week Google filed a brief backing Yahoo against a DOJ demand for email messages, a concrete reassurance to prospective Apps customers whose biggest objection to hosted mail is government access.

Second-order effects

• Google's chief Java architect publicly calling Java rudderless and pressing Oracle to put the platform back on track injects uncertainty into the server-side ecosystem beneath cloud offerings like Google's own, handing rivals a talking point against Apps reliability.
• An unconfirmed report that Google may raise Apple's mobile ad plans with the FTC suggests platform rivalry is migrating into regulatory venues, raising the compliance stakes around the same mobile surface Google just refreshed with a redesigned Gmail compose window for Android, iPhone and iPad.

Third-order effects

• If Schmidt's framing holds, enterprise software competition shifts from feature lists toward who can build the best multi-tenant sharing infrastructure, and a vendor's legal posture on data custody — like the Yahoo/DOJ brief — becomes part of the procurement conversation rather than an afterthought.