It's not much of a stretch to call Google one of the most trusted companies in tech. Unlike Microsoft, any wireless carrier or virtually any hardware vendor, consumers tend to trust Google and their "do no evil" motto. The company is generally seen as working for the good of the average netizen while pursuing profits, rather than doing whatever it takes to make a buck.

Now, most of that is probably true. Given their public actions during the last few years, it really does seem like Google generally tries to avoid doing anything "evil" in their quest to catalog all of the world's information (I'll leave it to you, reader, to decide whether or not that aim is inherently evil). But as you'll see in today's issue, the company has crossed a line this week. You might not know it yet but Google has covertly declared war on your IT department.

The company's latest enterprise product, Google Apps Team Edition, is essentially a clone of the enterprise version of Google Apps with one key difference: it doesn't require the IT department's blessing in order to be deployed. The application package can be set up, run and administered entirely by users, without the IT department's knowledge. And what happens when the IT department eventually stumbles upon the fact that users are using unsanctioned collaboration software? Why, they can simply purchase a real version of Google Apps and roll it out to the entire company. How convenient!

So, why is Google doing this? Just to annoy IT departments far and wide, most of whom are already up to their necks in self-proclaimed "power users" running unapproved software? Though it might seem that way, the real answer is far less vexing. Quite simply, Google wants to sell its software. And for all the hype you've heard about Google Apps being an "Office killer," the fact of the matter is that most enterprises are still years away from moving their mission-critical apps onto the web--leave alone trusting their confidential documents to an external server.

If you ask me, the time for Google Apps (and other web-based applications, for that matter) in the enterprise has not yet come. What Google should do is continue working on the suite, making it more and more attractive to IT departments and enterprises with each iteration. Instead, they're resorting to sneaky tactics in order to get their apps into the hands of business users. While the users might appreciate that, such tactics are not going to endear Google to anyone in IT. It seems to me that Google has failed to understand one of the tech world's most universal rules: if you want to get into the enterprise, you have to go thorough IT first. -Mehan