Why are Google's products disjointed?

I like Google, it's my search engine of choice and I use Google Apps for my personal domain such as email hosting. I use a few of their other products to like blogger, which you can see I use for this blog. Indeed Google have a great range of products that work extremely well and importantly the vast majority of them are free. Google is also an innovative company constantly looking at new products to offer, Google Wave and now Buzz have been released to expand the ever growing portfolio of products.

In my role as a Solutions Architect I am now quite frequently coming across large companies considering moving from Microsoft to Google for some of their key infrastructure services. Just last week I was at a meeting with the London Metal Exchange who are looking to move from Microsoft Exchange to Google Mail. For many it is a tempting proposition, with very little initial cost and a manageable monthly fee, especially when you consider you don't need servers as it is all Cloud hosted which means you don't need to worry about storage, backup and resilience to name a few. Being a Google Apps user and having worked with the Enterprise I have to say I am not entirely convinced it works for every type of business. Where Google seems to fail is on the simple day to day administration. An example of this is when a woman gets married, it's often the case that she takes her husbands name. In Microsoft Exchange you simply go into Active Directory and change her surname. A new email address with her new name will become her default but you can also keep the original address for people that reply to messages from the old address or don't know her new address yet. If you take the same situation in Google Apps. They suggest you backup all the email from the original account. Delete the account and then create a completely new account with the correct name, then import all the original email. Then you have to add the original email address as an alias. The Microsoft way takes all of 40 seconds to do but dependant on the size of the users mailbox and your Internet connection speed could take a very long time of which the user cannot access the service and any mail sent would be lost.

Now when you consider businesses using Google will also most likely have Active Directory you now have two places to manage instead of one, to me that doesn't seem efficient. But it's not just Google's applications not being able to integrate with Microsoft's products that leave them lacking but it's Google App's lack of integration with Google's own products. I decided to take a look at Google Buzz as I wanted to see how it would be different to Google Wave. Unfortunately I couldn't try either Wave or Buzz. The reason was because I use Google Apps. When you try to login to access Google Buzz it asks you for a Google Mail account. So I entered my email address which is the Google Apps one to find that doesn't count it has to be a @gmail.com address. The same went for Wave. Personally I cannot see why Google Apps users can't use these applications. After a bit of research it seems Google will be bringing these applications to Google Apps users but in a few months time. There reasoning is that they need to make modifications so that they work at a business / enterprise level. Fair enough I can see that but I'm sure I am not alone as just being a public user that wants his own domain name for email and blogs. Google Mail doesn't let you do this, so Google give you Google Apps for free. Problem is you cannot access these new products, simple says Google, set up a gmail address so you can try them out. That doesn't work though as suddenly your emailing all your friends with a different address. Again Google has an answer to this, forward the new gmail address to your Google Apps address. And this is where we come back to the problem about using Google Apps in an enterprise environment, it all feels disjointed.