"Gone Google" Campaign Arrives in Canada, UK

Google is expanding its "Gone Google" campaign into Canada and the UK, as well as further afield, to get businesses to switch from their everyday desktop applications to Google Apps, such as Gmail, Postini and Google Docs. Google is targeting small business who won't want to shell out for enterprise Microsoft Office licenses, as well as IT managers who are sick of supporting Outlook. However, this comes hot on the heels of a Gmail outage, as well as T-Mobile's catastrophic cloud-computing failure, in which Sidekick users found their data deleted. Again, we see the tradeoff between ease of use and immediate control over one's data.

Watch for the Gone Google" ads in places where business users congregate, such as airport lounges, where you'll see the familiar G logo alongside all those server-management ads for products that we can't even identify. Some of these enterprise-software decision-makers may be already be testing Google Wave, and that testing experience may also inform a software-licensing decision.