Google rules out Gmail and Drive apps for Windows 8
Google has revealed that it has no plans to develop dedicated apps for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 for its business app products such as Gmail or Drive. — Speaking to V3, the firm's product management director at Google Apps …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's refusal to build native Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 clients is the latest turn in a long-running contest with Microsoft over productivity software. A 2007 report found Google Apps no match for MS Office, and by 2009 analysts were still asking what was holding Google Apps back — so Google's answer now is to stop chasing Microsoft on its own desktop turf entirely and keep Gmail and Drive as browser products.
The timing sharpens the point: Microsoft spent 2011 reshaping Windows around touch and its own app model, including questions over dropping the classic Desktop app from Windows 8 ARM tablets. On the very day Google ruled out Windows clients, it shipped Google Maps for iPhone worldwide — evidence that the skip is a strategic choice about platforms, not a blanket aversion to native apps. Eric Schmidt had already framed Android's growth as analogous to Microsoft's 1990s desktop expansion, underscoring how directly the two companies now compete.
First-order effects
- Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 buyers who want Gmail or Drive get the browser experience only, since Google's Apps product management director has denied any plans for dedicated clients.
- Microsoft launches its flagship touch-first OS without one of the world's largest email and storage services as a store-listed app, weakening the platform's third-party catalog at the moment it most needs one.
Second-order effects
- The gap hands Microsoft's own bundled offerings — Outlook, SkyDrive and Office — a clearer run at Windows 8 users who might otherwise default to Google's free suite.
- Google's simultaneous investment in a native iPhone Maps app signals to other developers that platform support is now selective leverage: build where the audience or competitive stakes justify it, and let rivals' platforms fall back to the web.
Third-order effects
- If Google holds this line, productivity software increasingly decouples from native OS clients, and the browser becomes the delivery layer — eroding the operating system's traditional hold on which applications users can reach.
- Platform owners may respond by tightening integration advantages for their own suites, pushing the Google-Microsoft contest from app catalogs toward defaults, sync protocols and enterprise contracts.
The trend: Cloud productivity vendors are going web-first and treating native apps as strategic favors granted per platform, forcing operating-system rivals to compete on their own bundled suites rather than third-party catalogs.