Google Testing Full-Featured Google Apps
Google Apps users got a step closer to full Google-personhood this week, as the company sent invitations to select users to test out a version of Google Apps that includes all the features regular Google users get, including AdWords and Google Voice.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Apps has always been the stripped-down sibling of Google's consumer accounts — a fact The Long Tail flagged back in its August 2006 analysis of the power of embedded functionality, arguing that the real leverage was in what Google could slot into existing products rather than sell separately. This week's invitations to select users to test a full-featured Apps version, complete with AdWords and Google Voice, is the first concrete move to collapse that gap.
The timing is telling on two fronts from the same week: Google shipped Priority Inbox for Gmail on August 30 as it fights perception that its core product is overloaded, and Google Voice endured a week of spotty-to-unusable outages ending the same day — meaning the very service being extended to paying Apps customers was failing at its consumer debut.
First-order effects
- Select Google Apps administrators and users receiving invitations gain access to consumer-grade features — AdWords integration and Google Voice — inside accounts that previously excluded them, erasing the functional line between 'regular Google user' and Apps subscriber for that test group.
- Google gets an early read on whether enterprise customers will tolerate consumer services with consumer reliability: Google Voice's outage-riddled week immediately precedes the test, so any instability now lands on business-critical accounts.
Second-order effects
- AdWords advertisers gain potential new inventory and account surfaces if ads tooling extends into Apps domains, tightening the loop between Google's paid-search business and its hosted-product base.
- Rival hosted-suite vendors are forced to decide whether matching feature parity means absorbing consumer services — with their uptime risks — into their own business offerings, or holding the stability line and conceding the integration argument.
Third-order effects
- If the test generalizes, Google's account structure converges on a single identity spanning consumer and paid tiers, making the Apps-versus-free distinction a packaging decision rather than an architectural one.
- The invite-test-then-rollout cadence Google is using here — visible already this summer with Blogger Stats moving from Draft to production — becomes the template for how new capabilities reach enterprise customers, shifting buyer expectations toward continuous feature flow over versioned releases.
The trend: Google is dissolving the boundary between consumer accounts and paid business suites, testing whether one identity and one feature set can serve both markets.