As we previously reported, starting tomorrow Google will widen access to its innovative communications platform Wave, offering 100,000 new invitations to use the service. Many of these people in turn will be allowed to invite others to join as well, reminiscent of how GMail propagated. (It’s wise for Google to allow these new users to invite friends and family because you effectively can’t use Wave without contacts on the system.) Those who will gain full access tomorrow will apparently be developers, early users who provided feedback and some Google Apps customers.

My earlier blog post provided some initial “hands on” reactions to the service. It’s a powerful and flexible tool that defies easy categorization. As I said earlier this month:

[Wave] looks a lot like an email client. But Wave permits multiple people to interact in real-time with each other. It’s a mix of email and IM with some Twitter and iGoogle thrown in. Speaking of the latter, Wave will spawn a developer ecosystem and permits existing Google Gadgets and the new social gadgets to work within it. In other words, developers can build apps and users can access or import them within the platform and individual waves (conversations).

There’s also drag and drop photo sharing. One cool related feature allows full-screen slideshows of images added by any user participating in a wave. (Yahoo has been taking incremental steps toward something more like this with its series of Yahoo Mail upgrades.)

Wave can also act as a Twitter client or embed Twitter clients (and one would assume eventually Facebook too). One could also imagine it as a feed reader for news. Indeed, third party developer efforts will enable Wave to grow and change, built around basic functionality of real-time communication and collaboration. One could easily imagine Google Voice and Google Talk integration into Wave, and so on.

Accordingly 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 still considers Wave to be in “preview” as it works out kinks and bugs of one sort or another. As it releases Wave more broadly Google will gain considerable feedback, which should help it add features and refinements. Here’s the video demo of Google Wave in action from the I/O Developer event in May.

Google has more in its blog post this morning.

Postscript: There’s an already emerging developer ecosystem around Wave. These “extensions” (widgets, plug-ins) will make Wave’s value and use cases more obvious to new users and will speed adoption. For example, see the Ribbit extension for conference calls or 6 Rounds for video chat.

Capgemini Backs Google’s Software Push from the Associated Press covers how Paris-based tech and business consultancy CapGemini is going to start recommending and installing Google Apps on enterprise desktops, a move viewed as a big boost for Google’s “office” application aspirations.

CapGemini also works with Microsoft and IBM and “influences the type of software used on more than 1 million personal computers in companies worldwide” according to the article.

The Google Apps Premier Edition suite costs $50 per user account per year and includes phone support, additional storage and other services. Missing from Google Apps are a presentation application (coming soon) and a Wiki (coming as a rebranded Jotspot). Google bundles Sun Microsystem’s free StarOffice as part of its Google Pack, but it is not included in Google Apps for the enterprise.

In addition Google Gears is seeking to address, among other things, one of the persistent objections among enterprise users to working with Google Apps: they’re not available and can’t be used offline (e.g., on planes). Google Gears makes that possible.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in his recent Wired Interview, alluded to the company’s coming enterprise push:

Wired: I’ll phrase the question differently. Google gets its revenue essentially from one source — online ads. One could argue that it’s not diversified enough.

Schmidt: The criticism is valid. We do get the vast majority of our revenue from advertising, which is a business that a lot of other people would like to be in. But there are some new revenue models on the horizon. The most interesting is probably Google Apps, where we’re already beginning to get some significant enterprise deals.

Currently Google Apps doesn’t replace Microsoft Office (and many complain about data security with Google Apps) but Google is building out a formidable offering for businesses, app by app. Now CapGemini’s endorsement of Google Apps will cause many enterprise IT managers to take another look.

Microsoft has rolled out something similar to the Google Pack software bundle called “Windows Live Services.” Google Operating System has a lengthy (favorable) overview. The package includes mail and instant messaging, search toolbar, online storage, photosharing and blogging software, all from Microsoft.

It operates as something of an extension of Windows desktop software and is intended to create a kind of self-contained world of online applications. It’s also intended to boost awareness and usage of Windows Live search, as well as counter the growing Google Apps/Gears and “cloud computing” threat to Office and related Microsoft desktop software.

Microsoft vows it won’t let its core businesses be undermined by “the cloud.” This article from the NY Times (and related discussion at Techmeme) quotes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer saying that Microsoft will compete aggressively with Google and other online alternatives to Office and will offer Web-based versions of all its core software:

“We’re not moving toward a world of thin computing,” said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, referring to systems in which simple processing takes place on a PC, but more complex processing is moved to a centralized computer through a network connection. “We’re moving toward a world of software plus services.”

Nearly every Microsoft software application will be transformed with the addition of a Web-services component within 3 to 10 years, he said.

Even as Microsoft says it’s defending its home turf, the company is of course trying to aggressively compete in the world of search and online advertising, which is Google’s core franchise. Recent purchases of aQuantive/Atlas (for $6 billion) and AdECN, as well as high profile deals with Facebook and Digg, show how serious Microsoft is about being a major player in both arenas.

For its part, Google keeps saying its apps aren’t competing directly with Microsoft, but it also keeps doing things to make its software more appealing to enterprise customers. At Google International Press Day last month, CEO Eric Schmidt discussed some of Google’s enterprise products. Danny summarizes Schmidt’s remarks:

Google Enterprise [server business, as well as the hosted apps]. That business is likely to become a very important business for Google. Notes advertising is 97 percent of business and that they love it.

[Note From Danny: Schmidt also stressed again what he keeps positioning as a new tagline for Google: "Search, Ads & Apps." Google's obviously known for search; it's big on ads but until relatively recently didn't overtly acknowledge that as a core part of its business as opposed to "organizing the world's information." But Apps is an entirely new positioning -- one that has Google targeting Microsoft.]

Other developments such as Google Earth for Enterprise, Google’s acquisition of video conferencing provider Marratech, Google Gears and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, as well as others, are strong evidence that Google is serious about competing for enterprise business.

The advantage of Google Docs/Apps is that typically they’re collaborative, which people like, and accessible from any computer with a browser. Concerns include data security but also the richness and functionality of the applications. But my guess is that “3 to 10 years” is too long for Microsoft to wait to web-enable its critical applications; because by then the free, online options will be much better.

Being a non-developer I was a bit of a fish out of water at Google Developer Day yesterday. The event, which took place in the 10 countries where Google has offices, was intended to showcase Google Gears and the company’s various APIs. I attended the event in California, which was moved from Google’s Mountain View headquarters to the San Jose Convention Center to accommodate demand and attendance.

The Gears initiative is about creating an open standard to help turn the Web browser into a better, richer development platform and enabling applications to work “offline,” when there’s an inconsistent or non-existent Internet connection.

Fundamentally it bridges the current gap between the browser and desktop software.

Sergey Brin, in a roundtable interview with press after the morning session yesterday, specifically deflected competitive questions about Microsoft and said instead that the company was responding to user feedback and unmet needs in rolling out Gears. He said that there had been a “huge uptake” in Google Docs and that users wanted the ability to work with these tools offline.

“I want access to my stuff and don’t want to have to worry about devices or operating systems, with everything in the cloud,” Brin added. There were two opposite use cases that kept coming up: business travelers on airplanes and the developing world.

The ability to access applications such as Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Gmail on an airplane (where there is no connection) will make these apps more useful to enterprise users. (Google Reader is currently available but these other applications have yet to be rolled out for Gears.) At the opposite end of the spectrum, developing countries with limited or spotty Internet access will be able to use Google Apps — or any third party applications built on Gears.

Notwithstanding the avoidance of Microsoft competitive questions, the de-facto availability of these Google applications offline does address one barrier to adoption by business users in particular. They will not take market share from Microsoft Office any time soon but a segment of users may find Gears-enabled Google Apps to be a reasonable alternative in some cases.

Brin said also that the initiative was not just about access to applications but also their performance and responsiveness. “We started to fix the browser [with Gears] but there are still other problems to be solved.”

Other Google representatives at the table made the point that this was less about Google than creating a richer browser development platform for others. In that sense this is a logical extension of what Google started by releasing its Maps API to the world. They said that Google would benefit ultimately, albeit indirectly, through third-party creativity and applications that they expect to come out of Gears. Google Mapplets is an example of that.

With Maps and mashups Google built a “developer community” indirectly and somewhat passively. I got a very different feeling from yesterday’s event. Here was Google, as Web services and browser-based software company, self-consciously trying to extend the momentum and excitement it had generated with its Maps and other APIs into entirely new realms.