Google apparently underestimated how attached employees are to Outlook, the venerable e-mail program that epitomizes the "fat" collaboration and communication PC applications that Google despises and has vowed to eradicate from workplaces with its Web-hosted Apps suite.

Google announced Gmail For Your Domain -- the cornerstone for what would become Google Apps -- in February 2006, positioning its webmail service as an alternative hosted e-mail system for businesses vis-à-vis expensive and hard-to-manage internal messaging servers like Microsoft Exchange.

Although it gave Gmail support for POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) so that end-users could synchronize messages with Outlook and other PC e-mail applications, Google resisted for years creating a specific Outlook synchronization tool.

For Google, adopting Apps involved accepting a new way of communicating and collaborating in the workplace, namely with Web-hosted applications, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that it views as the future, versus what it considers the passé, desktop-centric Outlook and Office.

In addition to POP3 and IMAP, Google also developed its Gears browser plug-in for providing offline access to Apps components like Gmail and the Docs office productivity suite.