X
Business

Google Service Hosting: A new source of income

In addition to yesterday's list of domains discovered by Gary Price, I just found that Google also registered a heap of interesting domains on July 25th that suggest they are serious about hosted services.google-hosted-services.
Written by Garett Rogers, Inactive

In addition to yesterday's list of domains discovered by Gary Price, I just found that Google also registered a heap of interesting domains on July 25th that suggest they are serious about hosted services.

google-hosted-services.net/org/info  
google-hostedservices.com/net/org/info  
google-service-hosting.com/net/org/info  
google-servicehosting.com/net/org/info  
googlehostedservices.net/org/info
googleservicehosting.com/net/org/info  

Google has started rolling out hosted communication tools (Gmail, Calendar, Talk) to beta testers.  With great success, I have been using the hosted Gmail service for a while -- but I can verify it isn't quite ready for prime-time.  The Gmail client for hosted domains has a few noticible bugs and the Google Talk to Gmail integration doesn't work exactly as expected.

What other services could these domains be referring to? How about the suite of productivity services they are working on which include Google Spreadhseets and Writely?  To gain traction in the enterprise, they will have to let companies have more control over the final products though.   Currently, you can customize the logo in the hosted Gmail solution -- but I would really like to see full control over the color scheme and the addition of domain-wide customization to some features.

Right now, the hosted Gmail solution is free for beta testers, but according to their TOS they reserve the right to start charging for the service once the beta period is over.  If they can work out the bugs and convince companies that hosted services are ideal for the enterprise, they could be looking at the much needed second major source of income.

Editorial standards