Google Now Offering Phone Support for Chrome to Apps Users

Google Chrome is taking over the world, but there is one area where it's still got a lot of work ahead of it, the enterprise market. Internet Explorer is more entrenched there than anywhere else and Google has a tough time convincing companies to adopt Chrome over IE.

For one, IE comes built into Windows and is inherently more "trusted" by companies because of this. It also comes with the controls sys admins require to limit the usage of the browser and the damage that can be done through it.

More importantly though, companies have plenty of internal applications that rely on Internet Explorer and which won't work on anything else.

Still, Google is interested in the enterprise market and is using Chrome as an asset to lure companies into buying Google Apps.

Chrome already incorporates the type of group policy controls that companies need, but Google is taking it one step further and is now providing phone and email support for Chrome to Apps customers.

"Moving forward, Google Apps for Business, Education and Government customers may contact Google via phone or email to receive support on Chrome installation, functionality, security, browser policy settings and Google Apps interoperability for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux," Google announced.

Google doesn't get anything from enterprises using Chrome. But it doesn't get anything from regular people using Chrome either.

It's a free product and the only benefit for Google is people spending more time online, since the browser is faster enabling users to do more in the same amount of time, and see more ads in the process. That's less important in the enterprise environment.

However, the second big role of Chrome is as a brand image tool and that is a lot more valuable in the enterprise. But Google knows it's got a lot of convincing to do, it's not even trying to get companies to switch browsers altogether.

"If your organization uses a legacy app that isn’t compatible with Chrome, we suggest adopting a dual-browser strategy. The costs of using an old browser can range from reduced speed and feature gaps to exposure to critical security holes – far greater than the costs of supporting a second browser," Google explained.

Via: Google Now Offering Phone Support for Chrome to Apps Users