Google Apps - Adoption

Adoption

According to an announcement at the Google I/O conference in June 2002, Gmail now has 425 million users and 5 million businesses use Google Apps.

Google is making a concerted effort to increase usage, particularly in the public sector. The most recent example was the announcement in June, 2011 by US government agency, NOAA, that their 25,000 government employees would be migrated to Google Apps by year's end. In 2009, Los Angeles, California awarded Google a five-year contract to provide Google Apps services to 34,000 employees. As of early 2011, the City of LA was still in the process of deploying Google Apps after objections from LAPD officials surfaced about privacy. In early 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shifted 5,000 email accounts to Google Apps. On July 22, 2010, the General Services Administration certified that Google Apps met its GSA's cybersecurity requirements. On October 29, 2010, Google filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Interior, which opened up a bid for software that required that bidders use Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite. Google sued, calling the requirement "unduly restrictive of competition." Scholars have pointed out that, beginning in 2005, the prevalence of open standards and open source may begin to significantly change the way that public entities (which represent some of the worlds' most significant software purchases) choose to select vendors.