Priced at about $36 per user per year, iNotes is cheaper than Google’s (GOOG) Apps Premier Edition offering, which costs about $50 per user per year. And while it might not offer as many bells and whistles (IBM’s 1GB of storage is significantly less than the 25GB that Google provides), IBM (IBM) claims it more than makes up for it in security, reliability and privacy.

“We run the world’s most mission critical systems for banks, telcos and utilities,” said Sean Poulley, IBM’s vice president of online collaboration services. “It’s fair to say we’re pretty trusted….Candidly, Google has shown itself to be weak….There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service. We’re bringing business class services and support with mission critical reliability at a price lower than the competition.”

Perhaps it’s time to put that beta tag back on.

Google (GOOG) is aware of the issues and is working on a fix, according to a Google Apps Status message:

“September 24, 2009 7:29:00 AM PDT
We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we’ve provided a workaround below. We will provide an update by September 24, 2009 8:29:00 AM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

UPDATE: Google says it has resolved the issues affecting Gmail “for some users” and expects a resolution for the remaining ones within the hour. One caveat though: “Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google Outage Caused by Asian “Traffic Jam”
• New From Google Labs: Seriously Offline Gmail
• Hotmail Users Unable to Access Spam for Second Week

BoomTown was abuzz with Pixis, Plums and power this week as Kara focused on tech that wasn’t Apple, and reminded us that lady geeks hold the power in Silicon Valley.

While Apple was gathering clouds for its Rock and Roll storm, Palm (PALM) released the teeny Pixi, designed, Palm hopes, to steal some of that Apple (AAPL) thunder. The Pixi smart phone, while smaller and thinner, reported Kara, has fewer features and less power than the already available Pre.

Small can be good in the world of tech, and BoomTown reported that a certain Nordic tech behemoth thinks so too. Nokia (NOK) announced that it had acquired “microsocial networking” start-up Plum, whose signature offering allows users to build smaller, more intimate electronic social networks.

Kara did it “like a boss” this week and highlighted the tech sector mavens from Fortune magazine’s annual list of most powerful women. Ursula Burns of Xerox (XRX), IBM-er (IBM) Ginni Rometty and Oracle (ORCL) President Safra Catz were among those at the top. BoomTown will be at the upcoming conference associated with the Fortune list, so look for Kara’s Flip video interviews with these Titanias of tech.

It was nice of Apple to release new iPods just in time for John’s birthday this week, and Digital Daily returned the favor with high-bandwidth, hard-rockin’ coverage of Apple’s music-themed event, complete with live photos and blogging. John liked the video feature of the new iPod nano, but focused on the biggest news of the week–Apple’s upgraded CEO.

Digital Daily’s Apple coverage didn’t stop at The Steve. Ever since announcement of the exclusive Apple-AT&T (T) partnership, current and would-be iPhone freaks have speculated as to what kind of deal will be struck when that contract expires. John reported that iSuppli prognosticators think the agreement may be extended when it runs out in 2010.

John closed out the week with Twitter leaks about the newest incarnation of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Google-toppler (GOOG), Bing. Microsoft showcased Bing 2.0 at the annual company meeting, which some employees took as a green light to tweet away about the unreleased product. Microsoft HQ was more tight-lipped, telling John only that the rollout would happen over the next few months.

MediaMemo followed the money this week–specifically advertising dollars. A year after the Lehman collapse, Peter cited a MediaPost survey that showed some growth in ad spending. In a down market, Peter reminded, sometimes the only place to go, is up. Let’s hope so.

Not to be left out of Apple’s party, MediaMemo covered the release of an iPhone app from RealNetworks (RNWK) that brings all-you-can-eat music for a monthly fee. Wall Street barely blinked at the deal, but changes may come if the service catches on as competitor Spotify has in Europe.

And while the NFL won’t let players tweet from the end zone, it is upping its tech quotient by bringing blacked-out games to your Internet browser. MediaMemo reported that the lower-attendance games would be available to tech-savvy sports nuts–after midnight on game day. Get out the Fritos and espresso, guys, its game time.

True to form as the Lincoln of our very own Mt. Techmore, Walt’s address this week was aimed at helping the wayward get back on track with a bevy of new iPhone navigation apps. This new breed of high dollar apps harnesses the power of the iPhone 3GS to replace those ever present dash top GPS navigation units.

Walt extended his techno-presidential benevolence with another installment of Mossberg’s Mailbox. Networked storage, Quicken for Mac and the ominously impending switch to Windows 7 were all up for discussion.

At the Mossberg Solution, Katie tested Postbox, software designed to bring novel management solutions to your inbox. Developed by some of the guys from Mozilla, Postbox does offer lots of great features, Katie said, even if the switch to the new tools might not be easy for all.

Lots more shiny new tech talk next week. Stay tuned.

Why? Well, the CLIQ, or DEXT as it will be confusingly branded in the U.K., incorporates Motorola’s new “MotoBlur” service, which essentially corrals Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Picasa, GMail and MS Exchange activity into a single feed and presents them on your phone.

In form, the CLIQ is a sideways slider. Like the Palm (PALM) Pre, the device boasts a full touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. It’s got a 320 x 480-pixel, 3.1-inch HVGA screen and a five-megapixel camera. The CLIQ is video-capable (play, stream and capture) and supports the broad spectrum of media formats. It runs Android 1.5 (Cupcake), and Motorola (MOT) claims a battery life of six hours.

Jha says the phone is not intended to be a single iconic device–like, say, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Rather, it is the first of a broad line of handsets, all running Android and Motoblur, that will be targeted at different customer segments around the world.

A wise strategy in the current market? Who knows? But at least it’s a step in the right direction. Motorola clearly needs to do something to right itself after the past few disastrous years. Hard to believe the company controlled 16.1 percent of the global handset market just two years ago. It’s market share today? A modest 6.5 percent. The CLIQ will be sold through T-Mobile in the United States.

The device’s spec sheet below; click to enlarge.

It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google (GOOG), which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience.

The privacy implications are, of course, horrendous. And while Google will inevitably dismiss such concerns as paranoid and argue that any data the company might collect at the OS level will be used only to improve its services and benefit users, it should still give us all pause. Because when it is finally launched, Chrome OS will be yet one more deep well of consumer data to which Google will have access.

There are already quite a few such wells, including Google Search and Chrome, that profile user interests and surfing habits: Gmail, which gives the company access to our email conversations, and Google Voice, which gives the company access to our spoken ones. Add to this Google Street View and Latitude, a service that tracks the physical location of its users, and mobile and desktop operating systems and, well…that kind of consolidation of Internet-based services around a single dominant company should give us all pause.

Lest we forget, Google is in the behavioral targeting business. Why would people ever use an OS developed by a company whose business is based on meticulously recording and analyzing their online behavior? Because they enjoy using its other services, I suppose. But there is a privacy-vs-ease-of-use tradeoff here. And with Chrome OS, it is unprecedented. Further, while Google might tout its “don’t be evil” motto as reason enough to trust the company with our data, there are other entities that don’t always share that sensibility. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that the federal government tried to force Google to turn over user search data to the Justice Department…

“Competition in the OS market should always be welcome, but Google is the special case,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Digital Daily. “It has become dominant across many essential Internet services–search, mail, video, online apps, and advertising. Coupled with Google’s growing profiles of American consumers and reluctance to adopt meaningful privacy safeguards, we expect that antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will view Google’s entry into the OS market with enormous skepticism.”

Jeff Chester, executive director of The Center for Digital Democracy, echoed Rotenberg’s concerns. “Google’s new OS has to be placed under the data collection X-Ray by US and EU privacy regulators and advocates,” he said. “Any expansion into the marketplace by either Google or Microsoft should generate intense scrutiny, especially for the privacy implications. These two are engaged in a global data collections digital arms race, which has far-reaching implications for consumers and their information.”

Seems that Google (GOOG) has finally realized that it wasn’t doing itself any favors in enterprise by essentially advertising Apps as an immature product suite. IT managers are easily spooked at the mention of the word “beta.”

“We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase,” Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management for Google Enterprise, wrote in a post to the company blog. “So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.”

That mark presumably being the point at which Google is ready to guarantee uptime and reliability to end users….

“According to complaints from many residents, Google’s English language search engine has spread large amounts of vulgar content that is lascivious and pornographic, seriously violating China’s relevant laws and regulations,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regularly scheduled news conference. “I’d like to stress that google.com, as an Internet enterprise providing services in China, should earnestly abide by Chinese laws and regulations.”

The disruption of Google (GOOG) services follows a widely criticized mandate from Beijing requiring all computers sold in the country to include Green Dam, an application designed to prevent citizens from viewing “offensive” content, which in the Chinese government’s case includes all manner of material. From a report by the Open Net Initiative, an academic consortium dedicated to the study of censorship and surveillance:

The version of the Green Dam software that we tested, when operating under its default settings, is far more intrusive than any other content control software we have reviewed. Not only does it block access to a wide range of web sites based on keywords and image processing, including porn, gaming, gay content, religious sites and political themes, it actively monitors individual computer behavior, such that a wide range of programs including word processing and email can be suddenly terminated if content algorithm detects inappropriate speech. The program installs components deep into the kernel of the computer operating system in order to enable this application layer monitoring. The operation of the software is highly unpredictable and disrupts computer activity far beyond the blocking of websites.

…The deeply intrusive nature of the software opens up several possibilities for use other than filtering material harmful to minors. With minor changes introduced through the auto-update feature, the architecture could be used for monitoring personal communications and Internet browsing behavior. Log files are currently recorded locally on the machine, including events and keywords that trigger filtering. The auto-update feature can used to change the scope and targeting of filtering without any notification to users.

“The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data,” Microsoft explained in a post to the Outlook Team blog. “When a Google Apps user installs the sync plugin for Outlook, the plugin modifies a registry key which disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies upon the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken as a result. It is also important to note that uninstalling the plugin may not fix the issue.”

Uh-oh. Good luck finding that budget-request email you sent to your CFO a few months ago….

Google (GOOG) is working with Microsoft (MSFT) to resolve the issue, but the damage may have already been done. Enterprise is notoriously reluctant to embrace change specifically because of cock-ups like this. Enterprise likes familiarity. It likes seamless change. With Apps Sync for Outlook, Google provided the former, but it fell short on the latter. And that may inspire some companies that had been considering Apps Sync for Outlook to stick with Exchange for a while longer.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, for one thing. The App allows users to sync Outlook with Apps, just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange. Offers fast email sync with Google-native protocol, full calendar and contact sync, as well as global address autocomplete and search and free/busy information support.

Pretty slick. Google (GOOG) has essentially recreated the Outlook GUI within Apps. Seamless integration. Works offline. Same familiar Outlook experience. Use Gmail and outlook simultaneously. Everything is supported natively and, as the demoer notes, “your data is safe, it’s with Google.” Well, that’s one way to look at it.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook is available today as part of the company’s Premiere Apps. It’s available for Windows only.

A few quick case studies: Avago rep says this represents the “last hurdle” for users to get over migrating away form Exchange. The feedback we’ve gotten is that this looks “exactly the same” as Exchange. Genentech (DNA) rep relates a similar experience. “It looks like a native Outlook experience. The average has no idea we switched out the back-end…We anticipate widepsread adoption.”

Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division: “I bet you never imagined you’d see Google demonstrating Outlook for you all, so this is a first.”

In a year, Google Apps will be “night and day from what they are today.” That’s what Dave Girouard, president of Google’s (GOOG) Enterprise division, told attendees of the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch Technology Conference last week.

Today, we’ll likely find out whether that was truly a foretelling of things to come or more Google braggadocio. At an event in San Francisco, Google is expected to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft (MSFT) Office, something the company desperately needs to do if it wants to make deeper inroads in the enterprise area.

As Girouard himself admitted last week, Apps still has a ways to go. “Gmail is really the best email application in the world for consumers or business users, and we can prove that very well,” he said. “Calendar is also very good, and probably almost at the level of Gmail. But the word processing, spreadsheets and other products are much less mature. They’re a couple of years old at the most, and we still have a lot of work to do.”

In a few hours we’ll learn just how much work has been done and how much is left. Join us for live coverage beginning at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT).

• The title of this morning’s presentation is “Google Apps: The Enterprise Cloud.” Presiding over it, Andrew Kovaks from Google’s cloud computing team and Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division. According to the schedule provided, it will feature a CIO roundtable discussion as well as some new product demos.
• Girouard kicks things off with a quick overview of the business. Google is a 10-and-a-half-year-old company, he says, adding that Google Apps is about half as old as that. “We’re about five, five-and-a-half years into this initiative.”
• Girouard says the current recession has made cloud computing more urgent, more necessary. “This has been a really difficult environment. Everyone is feeling it and we need to respond…It’s important to invest in difficult times, especially during times when everything is telling you to cut back.” Great companies thrive during downturns, he notes, adding that Google is investing in Apps, because the company views it as an area the company can grow into for quite some time to come.
• Looking backwords for a moment, Girouard notes that this particular side of Google’s business was born out the company’s search app and then Gmail. Gmail, he adds, was initially conceived as an internal app before it was rolled out to the consumer market.
• A few interesting data points:

  –70 percent of the universities in the U.S. are in the process of outsourcing or moving their email to a cloud computing solution.

  –Google now has 1.75 million businesses on Google Apps.

  –It has more than 15 million active ursers.

  –Dozens of Apps customers with more than 1,000 employees.

• Increasingly, larger companies are moving to Google Apps. Among them, Genentech (DNA), the first large business to “go Google.” A Genentech rep is on hand to talk up the company’s experience which, obviously, was a positive one.

  Also, a recent advocate of Google Apps, Avago–the first company with over $1.5 billion in revenue to use Google Apps as a suite. “We save over $1.6 million a year using Google Apps,” says the Avago rep.

  Another recent Google App convert, Morgans Hotel Group, the proprietor of the Clift Hotel, at which this event is being held. The Clift rep says the platform has had a tremendous impact on the company already and it’s only just made the switch.

• So, why are companies adopting Google Apps? A few reasons: Radically lower costs, obviously. But also a steady stream of innovation. We haven’t exactly seen that from Google yet as I noted in the introduction, but presumably there will be some evidence of it on display later this morning.

  To be fair, Google did make a few additions to Apps last year–APIs and whatnot. Girouard offers Gmail offline and Secure Data Connector as examples of this. The company has made other smaller enhancements as well, such as extensibility features and enterprise Interoperability features.

• Interesting. Girouard says Google Apps often provides a 3X cost savings over other non-cloud solutions. He also says Google believes it has a more reliable product than most. The company is holding itself to that claim by being more transparent about downtime and service incidents. He notes the Apps Status Dashboard, which tracks up and downtime, as a move in this direction.
• “Failure is not an option,” says Girouard. His mandate to his team: There can be no failed deployments. Enterprise deployment and support must be streamlined and easy.
• All this is wonderful, but what’s the company got that is new today? Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook for one thing. The App allows users to sync Outlook with Apps just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange. Offers fast email sync with Google-native protocol, full calendar and contact sync, as well as global address autocomplete and search and free/busy information support.

  Google has essentially recreated the Outlook GUI within Apps. Seemless integration. Works offline. Same familiar Outlook experience. Use Gmail and outlook simultaneously. Everything is supported natively and, as the demoer notes, “your data is safe, it’s with Google.” Well, that’s one way to look at it.

  Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is available today as part of the company’s Premiere Apps. It’s available for Windows only and it is an enterprise-only service. It is, however, available for free to non-profits and educational institutions.

• A few quick case studies: Avago rep says this represents the “last hurdle” for users to get over migrating away form Exchange. The feedback we’ve gotten is that this looks “exactly the same” as Exchange. Genentech rep relates a similar experience. “It looks like a native Outlook experience. The average has no idea we switched out the back-end…We anticipate widepsread adoption.”
• Girouard: “I bet you never imagined you’d see Google demonstrating Outlook for you all, so this is a first.”
• Moving on now to the Q&A:
• Question: How much revenue flows through this?

  Girouard: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’ll get.

• Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft and its entrenchment in this particular sector?

  Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem. That’s a start, I suppose.

• Q: Is Outlook the only app that makes sense for this sort of sync, or is the company considering doing something similar with Excel and PowerPoint as well?

  Google’s clearly already put a lot of thought into this and expects to pursue it. That said, says Girouard: “We don’t view the world as you’ve got to get rid of Office and use Google Apps instead. We see it as more nuanced than that.”

• Q: Did the IT folks in the room have any concerns about Google’s commitment to these services?

  Apparently not. The Morgans Hotel rep says has has “no reservations about the future viability of the product.” Gmail’s been around for a while now, hasn’t it? Also, notes Avago guy: “Don’t be evil is one of Google’s core values…We’re taking them at their word.”

Interesting comment from Genentech rep amid remarks out mobile needs: “I can’t get Android phones fast enough for our folks.”

• Q: What areas are showstoppers for CIOs considering a migration to Google Apps? What services and apps do they absolutely need to retain control over?

  The Morgans Hotel rep says none. “We’re looking to move everything to the cloud.” The Avago and Genentech reps say pretty much the same thing. The Genentech rep: “Anything in the cloud is fine by us.”

• Q: What areas can developers play in without being crushed by Google?

  Giouard says there are many. “We’re going to have a very large installed base of Google Apps users and there’s a great opportunity here for developers to sell into that…We are really opening up the stack to the developer world and that’s going to be great for our business customers.”

• Q for Genentech rep: At what point will you shut down Outlook?

  “I don’t see us shutting it down any time in the near future, but we hope that the number of Outlook users shrinks as our employees see the benefits of the Web and Google Apps.”

• Asked for his feelings on companies that use the term “cloud computing” to peddle non-cloud computing services, Giouard replies: IT giants have co-opted the cloud computing term.