The government said the following in its press release about the rationale:

The contract provides for an easily accessible suite of services, including e-mail and collaboration tools, to facilitate a more mobile work force.  While agencies have moved sub-entities’ e-mails to the cloud, GSA is the first to utilize a cloud-based system for e-mail agencywide.  The migration will result in a 50 percent savings over the next five years when compared to current staff, infrastructure, and contract support costs. GSA’s move to cloud-based e-mail and collaboration tools is part of a government-wide effort to utilize more agile, lightweight technology such as cloud computing and to shared services to limit the need for expensive, redundant infrastructure.

Google said that earlier this year its Apps platform “became the first suite of cloud computing email and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification, enabling agencies to compare the security features of Google Apps to that of existing systems.”

Not all government agencies are equally forward thinking and sometimes they need a little nudge. Google is providing that to the Department of the Interior in the form of a lawsuit for not considering Google Apps and only considering Microsoft software in a recent agency procurement round for its 88,000 employees.

One might wonder about security of government data in The Cloud. But human error probably remains a greater threat than the security of the involved systems. In November a GSA employee “accidentally” sent the names and Social Security numbers of all 12,000 of the agency’s employees to a third party email address, exposing them to potential identity theft.

Thanks to Gary Price for alerting us to this item.

Accordingly the new “Cloud Connect” brings together Google Docs/Apps with web content and other internal company documents. Google said that it now has 3 million businesses using Google Apps.

Google also says that it has improved navigation with the latest release:

Our new Dynamic Navigation feature allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries, and Active-Active Mirroring improves reliability by spreading search traffic across multiple boxes. Dynamic Navigation was a top user request and we’re glad to be able to add it.

Google added that GSA now supports Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 content.

Overall the new functionality is designed to be comprehensive and bring internal, cloud and external web and cloud content together in a single searchable interface.

Perhaps that was the problem; it offered too many possibilities. Beyond that people didn’t necessarily see the need for Wave, even if it was more productive and efficient than more conventional tools.

Here’s what Google said when Wave launched:

After months holed up in a conference room in the Sydney office, our five-person “startup” team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we’re very eager to return and see what the world might think. Today we’re giving developers an early preview of Google Wave.

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Google is now shuttering Wave:

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

Some of its features, as the Google post says, will live on in other Google products.

There was something very unfamiliar and even “avant-garde” about Wave to many, despite a range of virtues. People didn’t and perhaps couldn’t “get it” at a glance. The bottom line is that it just may have been to complex, ambitious and ambiguous for other than a small segment of techies.

Here’s what I said after using it a bit:

Wave has huge potential, but people will definitely need to use and experiment with it before they understand and see its benefits. There’s a clear learning curve and some complexity surrounding the product; it’s not entirely intuitive. Wave probably also needs to incorporate email in order to go mainstream.

Google could potentially have simplified Wave and scaled it back, or focused it on fewer core features. And Google also probably needed to do some more outreach and education around the product.

Google has historically been reluctant to favor products or promote them, preferring instead to let them sink or swim on their own. Google’s philosophy surrounding new products is not unlike what happens when sea turtles hatch on the beach: those that gain adoption organically make it back to the water and live. Those that cannot or are intercepted by predators don’t.

Google Wave obviously didn’t make it back into the sea.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See related posts:

• Google Broadening Wave Access With GMail-Like Rollout
• Google Expanding Access To Wave Soon, First “Hands-On” Impressions
• Google’s New Wave Of Ambition
• Live Blogging Google Wave

Here are the feature upgrades from the Google blog post:

• More merchant customization: Today we’re introducing a full merchandising dashboard, which gives merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering. Marketers and product merchandisers can now do all of this themselves—no custom code necessary. New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, navigation bar with filters, and simple product ranking rules mean seasonal optimizations can be done on the fly.
• Better shopper experience: With query autocompletion, retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding. GCS is also faster and more relevant than before thanks to search quality improvements. Because it’s hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. We’ve also added spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonym options to make shopping on a retail site as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com.
• Improved browsing and navigation: Many shoppers depend on the search bar on retail sites when they’re looking to make a purchase, but some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products. Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around your site as well as searching directly for products.

I spoke briefly to  product manager Nitin Mangtan yesterday afternoon. He said that Google was the only major vendor to offer a fully hosted, cloud-based model. There are a range of enterprise players that offer competing products, including IBM, but they all require on-site installs.

Among the improved features of Commerce Search, Google is offering auto-complete and search suggestions that are unique to each retailer or manufacturer’s catalog. As the bullets above also indicate, Google now powers browsing and navigation on sites via Commerce Search.

Google provided a range of sites that were currently using Commerce Search including Birkenstock, ChemistDirect (UK), Smart Furniture, DiscountOfficeItems.com.

Digital marketing firm OneUpWeb found in a recent e-commerce study that “e-commerce sites have a 45% task failure rate.” Part of Google’s pitch for Commerce Search is improved usability overall.

I asked how many buyers were using Commerce Search currently. Google declined to give any specific numbers and instead told me that more than 30,000 companies use enterprise search. I also asked whether Google was redistributing the data from the feeds into Google Product Search. Mangtan said that most of the sites it works with already are providing their data to Google Product Search.

I also questioned Mangtan about local or offline inventory and whether Google was getting any of that through Commerce Search relationships  — or would be. He said no, this is only about e-commerce.

Finally, I asked whether any of the sites would be incorporating AdWords/AdSense. He said that some retailers might but that was a separate relationship. However, I pointed out that most probably wouldn’t want to serve up ads from competitors that would lure them off the retailer’s site.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google controls billing for paid apps and gets a 20 percent cut of the revenue. All of the apps will potentially integrate with existing Google tools and services. According to the Google Blog:

Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each . . .

Google’s partner slide at launch:

Google has enjoyed some momentum in the enterprise with Apps but adoption has been tiny relative to Microsoft’s installed base of software users. This however would appear to be a “game changer,” to use the overly used phrase, by bringing all sorts of creativity and new functionality into Google Apps. It also instantly creates a broader ecosystem around the offering that will drive interest and adoption.

As with other apps marketplaces users can search by keyword and refine for functionality (e.g., “payroll”) as well as see user ratings for apps:

Because all this is in the cloud, expect varying degrees of mobile integration.

We were invited but I was unable to attend and so didn’t get to explore specific questions and issues, such as whether this would become more consumer-facing or a parallel consumer version would emerge at some point. However, there is much more discussion of particulars on Techmeme.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Commerce Search, as Google describes it, promises to improve an e-commerce web site’s search and usability. It’s hosted on Google’s servers, and — like any good shopping cart software — offers a variety of customization options, including look and feel, product promotions, and more. Commerce Search also includes some Google search technologies like spellcheck, stemming, and synonym matching, and is integrated with Google Analytics by default.

When combined with Google Checkout — as shown in the introductory video (also embedded below) — this is nothing short of an all-inclusive e-commerce software package. Retailers upload their product data to Google, then customize the search/e-commerce options, and end up with a Google-hosted shopping cart. Pricing is based on how many products/SKUs in the retailer’s data feed, and how searches are done on the retailer’s store.

Here’s Google’s brief introductory video about Commerce Search.

Customized search results. You can change the look and feel of search results to match the underlying design of a website, using a relatively straightforward XML API provided by Google.

Optional ads. With the free version of Google Custom Search, Google displays ads alongside search results. With the Business Edition, ads in search results are optional.

Dedicated enterprise support. The new service offers both email & phone support,

Optional Google branding. Don’t want the Google logo on your search results? You can easily turn it off.

Custom Search Business Edition starts at $100 a year for searching up to 5,000 pages and extends to $500 for 50,000 pages. Larger volumes of pages are supported through Google’s enterprise sales group. For smaller sites, businesses can sign up using a credit card for payment, and get a site search up and running quickly using a simple online interface.

To see an example of Google Custom Search Business Edition in action, see Holiday Home Rental, an online directory of 25,000 holiday rental homes with more than 150,000 pages of content. More information about the new service at the Google Custom Search Engine page.

Google said they made this move so that they can “focus more on the software side.” Google is also excited about Dell’s capabilities of marketing the search appliance globally.

The Google Enterprise Blog posted this commercial on their blog, showcasing some of the marketing Dell has already begun for the Google Search Appliance.

It is also important to note that Google and Dell have a search partnership already, installing Google software on all Dell personal computers.

Universities and colleges are typically always looking for ways to cut costs, and the Google Apps services are apparently very attractive to a number of them. Just the email service alone is nearly enough to get lots of universities to seriously consider outsourcing some of their IT work—10 gb storage per account with good uptime guarantees and no longer having to deal with the spam policing are enough to get many an educational IT administrator to salivate. The free, Educational Edition is really cool, too, even if it only offers 2 gb of email storage.

Doesn’t this educationally-targeted promotion campaign sound just the least bit familiar? Oh, that’s because Apple used to provide free or reduced-rate stuff to schools, starting way back in the eighties, in order to get impressionable young people to become dedicated lifelong consumers. That school promotion campaign of Apple’s was cited as being responsible for building a committed user following in the face of Microsoft’s growth, and it helped to drive Apple sales as parents sought to support their children’s education by purchasing computers for the home. Google’s now hopped onto a formula that could work at sliding the thin end of the wedge under Microsoft, and many universities are abuzz with talk about possibly integrating their apps to save on IT resources and money.

The Google Apps “poster child” is apparently Arizona State University, which is one of the earlier, largest public universities to adopt the service in favor of their own home-grown email system. ASU’s decision is being discussed by many other universities across the country after their deal was highlighted in Educause meetings and discussion email lists, as well as articles in campus newspapers all over.

ASU’s vice president and university technology officer, Adrian Sannier, commented about the deal: “We believe that strategic alliances with technology leaders like Google are key to accelerating the contribution that technology can make to ASU’s academic enterprise.”

The university’s press release doesn’t relate how much money they’ll save in man-hours and infrastructure costs from offloading the mail, not to mention how much they may save from using stuff like Google Docs & Spreadsheets instead of MicroSoft Word & Excel.

Microsoft also offers discounts on their software packages, but they don’t appear to’ve targeted the enterprise-wide end of the school equation in the way that Google now is doing.

Here’s a few more of the colleges and universities who are integrating with Google Apps (I linked to news stories or other info pages about each school’s use of Google, where possible):

• Abilene Christian University

• Aquinas College
• Cambria-Rowe Business College
• Concordia University – Saint Paul (pilot program)
• Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University, India
• Hofstra University
• Kenyan & Rawandan universities
• Lakehead University
• Manhattan Christian College
• Northwestern University
• Politecnico Grancolombiano, Columbia
• San Jose City College
• South East European University, Macedonia
• St. Louis University
• Swarthmore College
• Thunderbird School of Global Management
• Trinity College
• Victoria Junior College, Singapore
• Wyzsza Szkola Biznesu – National Louis University, Poland

Some university IT departments are urging caution with turning over so much private data to an outside company, or voicing concerns about service levels compared with their dedicated in-house crews and more-established software packages, but many others appear to be just holding out in a wait-and-see mode (see Plymouth U, UC Irvine, and Arizona U), opting to observe how Google Apps implementations go for other universities before they decide if they’ll switch over.

I earlier mentioned that Google appeared to be planning to build out campus maps through the Sketchup contest, and the Google Apps deal seems to indicate an even larger overall strategy to woo the educational community over to Google and away from Microsoft. Google’s SiteSearch service has already been supporting university websites for many years, and their annual Summer of Code also helps to nurture future technical employees by targeting students.

Chris “Silver” Smith is Lead Strategist at Netconcepts, and a regular contributor to the Locals Only column which appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

Update: Official press release just released. Updates to the Google Mini include:

(1) Secure Search (2) Google OneBox for Enterprise (3) Site Search Improvements

More details at mini.google.com.