When the giants make a move or show progress as Abe points out, changes happen (and aggregate progress is made) – both from the reaction of other giants, and the scurry of the smaller players trying to remain relevant and competetive.

And you’re right, the fact that “enterprise” users are the target here means more for immediate mindshare impact than what the overall impact may actually be on the enterprise SaaS market. The notion of enterprise SaaS will gain more ‘face time’ in the industry, which is of course good for us all.

As you said, Google’s announcement if nothing else has served to catalyze the notion of enterprise SaaS.

Most likely the case of whose market share will be impacted is irrelevant compared as to what this means for the SaaS industry as a hole. The question of “if SaaS” is gone and we’ve known it for a good time now, the new question is “when SaaS”; and moves like this one validate it more and more.

The news about Google is great validation for SaaS and also Enterprise SaaS; this is greater enhanced with Salesforce.com quarter release that shows their booming growth in the large enterprise space.

- Abe

What will the *actual* impact of this be? That doesn’t matter as much as the perceived impact. The actual impact will probably be Microsoft’ Live Office that they’ve been sitting on until Google announced their suite.

- Lincoln

Everybody is focused on how Google is going to impact Microsoft’s market share when in reality it is far from coming close to that. The little guys should be the ones concerned as Google’s products align more with their target market.

If anything the Google apps could still from the ocassional MS Office Home user but as far as the Enterprise user it has a very very very long way to go.