Labs for Google Apps: Will enterprises try new features?

As Google takes steps to sell its Google Apps software to companies around the world, competing in a market long dominated by Microsoft and IBM, analysts say the internet giant must change business users' expectations of technological change, speed and development. That fight for hearts and minds could not have been made any more clear this week by the company's launch of Labs for Google Apps, a website where Google Apps users can try new features fresh from Google's engineers.

"There is a widely held belief that technology progress in the enterprise is slow and methodical, that adoption cycles are long, and that experimentation is inappropriate," Gabe Cohen, the Google Apps product manager, wrote in a blog post announcing the feature. "Here at Google we believe that experimentation is a good thing - even in the enterprise space."

But since February, 2007, when Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a Web-based software package aimed at businesses, the message Google has tried to convey hasn't always resonated with prospective customers. Though a brute force with consumers on the Web, Google has been dogged with reliability issues for the enterprise edition of Google Apps. Most recently, Google's Gmail service went down for as many as 30 hours for some Google Apps business customers.

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