I’ve been wondering how many businesses use Google Apps almost exclusively for messaging, and how many of them make substantial use of collaboration. My expectation is that a substantial number of the folks with custom domains on Google Apps solely or almost-solely do email or email forwarding. For instance, for my WordPress.com-hosted blog, I have no option for email for that domain other than via Google Apps, because WordPress.com has explicit MX record support for them and nobody else — so I use that to forward email for that domain to my regular email account. Given how heavily bloggers have driven domain registrations and “vanity” domains, I’d expect Google Apps to be wrapped up pretty heavily in that phenomenon. This is not to discount the small business, of course, whose usage of this kind of service also becomes more significant over time.

Those statistics aside, though, and going back to Tom’s thoughts on transparency, I think he’s right, if Google intends to court the enterprise market in the way that the enterprise is accustomed to being courted. I am uncertain if Google intends that, though, especially when fighting more featureful, specialized vendors in order to get an enterprise clientele is likely a waste of resources at the moment. The type of enterprise who is going to adopt this kind of solution is probably not the kind of enterprise who wants to see a bunch of case studies and feel reassured by them; they’re independent early adopters with high tolerance for risk. (This goes back to a point I made in a previous post: Enterprise IT culture tends to be about risk mitigation.)

Google announced something very interesting yesterday: their Native Client project.

The short form of what this does: You can develop part or all of your application client in a language that compiles down to native code (for instance, C or C++, compiled to x86 assembly), then let the user run it in their browser, in a semi-sandboxed environment that theoretically prevents malicious code from being executed.

Google has also exhibited significant interest in LLVM (which stands for Low-Level Virtual Machine). Among other things, LLVM makes it easier to do analysis of code, something that is going to be critical if Google’s efforts with Native Client are to succeed. I am somewhat curious if Google’s interests intersect here, or if they’re entirely unrelated (not all that uncommon in Google’s chaotic universe).