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While this approach may work in the enterprise space in the short term, in the long run, they're alienating the very people whose alliances they need in order to become a success. Today, with Google's announcement of Google Sites, the blogosphere is already comparing the product to Sharepoint and trying to drive nails into Microsoft's coffin. I'd argue that it's far too soon to claim that Google is offering anything that really has a shot at making a dent in the enterprise world.

As an online suite of applications, email, calendaring, IM, and even security and compliance with Postini's help, Google Apps is off to a good start as being a suite that really has it together. For the small to medium size business, you could say that Google makes a strong offering as a more affordable alternative to Microsoft Servers and applications. However, it's a big jump from offering tools to a mom-and-pop as compared with a global, Fortune 500 company.

Google is actually going about marketing to the enterprise market in a pretty ingenious way - they're not. Instead, they're bypassing the IT department (who would, in all honesty, probably laugh at the thought) and marketing their suite on the sly directly to the employees themselves: "Are the tools provided by your IT department too unwieldy to use? Is IT to slow to respond to your needs? Then forget IT and use Google Apps instead!" This is definitely a good plan for Google in the short term, but it's not one that is going to be good for them in the long run...especially when IT catches on to what their users are doing.