14 DAY TRIAL // Google is expanding in many directions and in many areas but the biggest focus lately has been in enterprise and business applications and services. Google Apps, the company's set of applications aimed at businesses, schools and other organizations, has been growing steadily, now boasting 1.75 million customers, but it's still in the little league compared to similar offerings from Microsoft or IBM. So, in order to get the word out more, Google is going for an all-out campaign promoting Apps, mostly online but also with billboards in several locations in the US.
The campaign, called Going Google, will tout the advantages of Apps and list the reasons why some 3,000 organizations are switching to the suite every day. As expected, the bulk of the campaign will be online; this is Google after all, a company that makes billions from online advertising, but, in a rare move on its part, it will also feature four billboards on several highly trafficked highways in the US. The exact locations are the 101 in San Francisco, West Side Highway in New York, The Ike in Chicago and the Mass Pike in Boston.
The campaign will detail the story of an IT manager who finds out about Google Apps and decides to make the switch. It will run for 30 days, with a new message every day, and will list some of the advantages and cost savings of “Going Google.” Apps offers several Google products like Gmail, Docs, Calendar and others as an integrated suite and is aimed as an alternative to Microsoft Office and Exchange server or Lotus Notes and Domino server.
The competition between Google and Microsoft has been heating up lately, with the former first announcing Chrome OS, a fully fledged operating system, and the latter then unveiling that Office would be getting cloud variants of some of the suite's most popular products, a direct attempt to prevent users from switching to Apps. In the search market things are getting more serious as well, with the new Yahoo – Microsoft deal, and now Google is on the offensive again with the new advertising campaign.
