Google is taking its currently US-only "Gone Google" advertising campaign overseas to countries including Britain, France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore, as the company seeks to lure businesses away from traditional software to their cloud-based services.
Through the "Gone Google" campaign, the company tells the stories of corporate customers who have switched to Google Apps, meaning that they "no longer have to deal with the hassles of managing e-mail servers or rolling out software updates."
It represents a rare move by Google into the world of mass-market advertising; demonstrating the level of competition in the market to provide businesses with email and office software. With Microsoft and IBM dominating the enterprise email market, Google is hoping companies will be convinced by the lower maintenance costs of using their cloud-based services.
However, questions have been raised over the reliability of such services for business users due to recent high-profile outages, including a few outages of Gmail this year alone.
More than 2 million businesses and 20 million active users now use the California-based company's online office software. The figure includes both large businesses that pay $50 a year per user, as well as small companies which can get the software for free.
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