It seems like the major criticism leveled by the article is that Postini customers want support and are willing to pay for it and google is not offering support and not making them pay for it.<p>Seems like the perfect opportunity to sell Postini support now that they aren't bundled anymore. Support isn't Google's core competency anyway, they're probably leaving this to others on purpose.
The real problem is inertia.<p>'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM', remember? It'll take a generation to get rid of the crap, but it will happen. The CIO at USC arranged a campus-wide rollout; more will follow. Once students (who then enter the workforce and, eventually, make decisions) decide that $free >> $discounted for Office, and things like a proper mail merge/track changes/export to Word are implemented, it's all over.<p>Things like Scribd and ever-improving ajax applications, along with hopefully forthcoming solutions to permit web browsers to exploit multicore 'puter power, should help a lot. It always blows me away when managers make excuses for paying (out of habit) for features that their workers do not use. Free is not always better, but all other things kept equal, free+no-local-maintenance is very good for a company.
"left partners reeling and searching for more channel-friendly vendors for their customers’ e-mail security needs.”<p>doesn't channel-friendly just mean higher priced?
nb. The article covers Postini, which is like SpamAssassin/DSPAM (or Zimbra for that matter), only it costs money. There are some details that I am eliding, but fundamentally, that's what we're talking about.<p>Postini likely adds a great deal of value to Gmail by virtue of the vastly larger corpus. If that means that Postini is no longer a viable product for 3rd-party deployment, tough shit for the 3rd parties.<p>What I don't understand is why a Postini user (eg.) wouldn't just switch to Gmail for Domains and forward everything through an IMAP relay.<p>I originally replied (on autopilot) regarding the existing Google Docs/Applications framework. If they don't merge the entire mess into a rollup offering, I'm going to be flabbergasted.