Will we see commercial/enterprise Gmail? I was thinking the other day about the whole Web as a platform thing and how Google, with their huge platform is going to utilise this. What I though is that one of the next big things Google will do is look at the possibility of commercialising the ‘killer app’.

Google have already proved they can take email from the desktop platform to the web platform. Personally I prefer Gmail to Outlook or Thunderbird. However, for a commercial user, one thing they have over Gmail is the scheduling/calendar functionality, although this is not yet at version 1.0 in Thunderbird. Also, I don’t know whether Google are working on this , but I suspect that someone there has the foresight to at least assess its value. We may even see it as part of a ‘Gmail Pro’ targeted at the serious, but not necesarily enterprise user.

However, there is the issue of privacy and security. Google would have to ensure that these were well sorted out before any commercial organisation would seriously consider using it.

Administration could be an interesting issue for an enterprise version. Although keeping it simple is best, I can hear the cries already of ‘but I need to change this to stop our users…’