Google has been making some noise of late with wins for their Google Apps solution – notably at The Telegraph newspaper and Sanmina-SCI.

With this weeks GMail outages though I wonder if those customers are considering their decision? I doubt it, but it draws in to focus the approach of running paying business customers on the same platform as your free consumer service. By comparison, our Exchange Online solution doesn’t run on the same platform as Live Mail (aka Hotmail) and I think people would be shocked if it did. I simply couldn’t see a customer like Nokia or Coca Cola agreeing to run their corporate email off the back of something like Hotmail – even for their most basic needs.

Hey-ho, I suppose time will tell which approach works out the best but I’d be more comfortable running my business on a platform dedicated to my needs rather than sharing with a consumer derived platform. The Google Groups discussion shows what some customers think with Dan at Crushpad saying “Microsoft could do better than this, and that's _really_ pathetic.” :)

I know, I know….people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones but I’m pretty optimistic about our solution here and analysts like Phil Shih with Tier 1 Research are questioning Google’s readiness to move to the enterprise. Over at ZDNet, Ryan Stewart is advocating a hybrid approach which seems to be what we’d term Software plus Services to address some of these issues.

It’ll be interesting to watch this play out.