have their e-mail switched

have their e-mail switched Sergey Brin, a co-founder, stressed during a session pandora braceletwith a group of reporters on Wednesday that Google not only took that business seriously indeed, but that it was gaining ground. “We’re getting a lot of traction with enterprises,” Mr. Brin said.

To be sure, many of the nearly two million businesses that use Google Apps — its Web-based software including e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet and collaboration programs — are small. But he counted large institutions too, like Genetech and Motorola, among the converts.

Google’s marketing efforts are being beefed up. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, who knows plenty about the enterprise market from his days at Sun Microsystems and Novell, is making more sales calls himself. And Google increasingly is going head-to-head against Microsoft on prominent accounts, like the competition to replace the Los Angeles City government’s outdated e-mail system, which is a multimillion-dollar project.

Still, a new study from Forrester Research suggests that Google’s progress will come gradually. For all the talk about discontent with Microsoft’s e-mail system, the users are generally not among them. In a survey of 2,001 information workers, only 10 percent of the people using Microsoft Outlook said they would be happy to have their e-mail switched.

Google’s efforts to cater to corporate and government customers — the enterprise market — have long been seen as half-hearted. Google is a consumer company, after all, so the enterprise side of the business looked to be the poor relation.

And Outlook, to be sure, has a huge lead. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they regularly used Outlook, compared with 7 percent for Google Gmail and 6 percent for Microsoft’s Web-based Hotmail.

“People are not unhappy with what they have,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester. “We’re not going to see a bottom-up, work force-led revolution in e-mail. It’s going to be incremental.”