Remember when Google signed a deal with Sun and everyone was talking about them trying to team up and steal the office software market from Microsoft? A year later, that's not yet happened, what has happened is that Google has launched an initiative to steal the office collaboration market from Microsoft - and, of course, when 'office collaboration' and 'Microsoft' appear in the same sentence, what we're really talking about is Exchange, perhaps with a little SharePoint thrown in.

Feature for feature 'Google Apps for Your Domain' has everything important you get from Exchange and SharePoint (or it would do if the Page Creator thing ever worked) except it's easier to use and cheaper. Big corporates are going to blanche at having a load of key data stored outside their own network, but I expect Google probably have better infrastructure expertise than 90% of them. Small businesses are going to have to seriously consider this as an option over Small Business Server and startups can get all the networked business systems they ever need if they combine Google Apps with Basecamp, one of the many web CRM solutions and perhaps Amazon Compute for their application hosting.