There is an e-mail revolution underway; Google raises stakes against online Outlook

As I was hammering out this post about Yahoo yesterday, a team over at Google was crafting a blog entry of its own, announcing Tasks - basically a to-do list - built into the Gmail interface. My EIC, Larry Dignan, had it right in his post that there's really not much to it. A clean interface to create and organize the lists with a couple of standard options. But it's OK that it's light on features. This is a product that's being launched in Labs, a testing ground for new applications for the Gmail interface.

In one sense, Yahoo and Google are doing the same thing - building around an idea that e-mail is here to stay, regardless of the competitors who were considered contenders to unseat e-mail - IM, texting, Twitter, Facebook. But in another sense, they're each taking e-mail into different directions. Yahoo, as I mentioned in yesterday's post, appears headed down more of a social networking path - a potential thorn in the side of Facebook.

But Google, like Zoho, is going after Microsoft. It's using e-mail to build an Outlook killer in the cloud. E-mail is still central to the page but other Google tools, notably calendar and docs, have joined chat on the main e-mail page in the form of sidebar widgets (now, available on both sides of the e-mail window. Contacts are built in to Gmail. And now, there's Tasks.

Google has been pushing Apps - which includes Gmail, Docs and more - as a way of doing business in the cloud in more cost-effective way. I can understand why Larry would be thrown off by the attention that Tasks is getting - there's no way that this feature is Google's secret weapon to convince business users to give cloud applications a try. But by launching it early - in a raw form - Google is encouraging early adopter types (you know who you are) to speak up and tell the team what you think. (And I'm sure many of you will.) Got an idea? Send it along. When I enabled Tasks on my gmail account last night, I did so with the understanding that it's not done yet. Right out of the gate, there were a couple of things I didn't like and a few things I think were missing. I've felt the same way about Gmail, Docs, Calendar and other Google products. But now, I have the chance to share my thoughts. So I'll pass along my ideas. And who knows? Maybe my idea will just randomly appear on Tasks (or in Gmail) one day.

As for the competition up in Redmond, I wrote last week that the internal testing for Microsoft's Office for the Web was carrying over into 2009 and a beta launch would be delayed. As for an official release date - there still isn't one. I'm sure Office for the Web will be chock-full of cool new features when it launches sometime next year. In the meantime, people who would like to break away from the desktop and start managing  their lives on the cloud should think about what you'll get with Google - a work-in-progress that may need still updates but at least is available to use now.