Last week, Google introduced Google Apps Team Edition, an interesting way for users of the Google Docs and Calendars services to work collaboratively. Team Edition allows those accessing the service from the same organization to share documents and calendars (and search across colleague’s work). Your ability to participate in your organization’s Team Edition network is verified by email. So, all users from *@company.com are able to access their colleague’s work. The product also allows corporate IT to step in and manage (if they so choose). This creation of a low cost, shadow IT department, where thick client applications rapidly recede into history has some bleak implications for those who have a lot at stake on the status quo. Last week, the NYT’s Matt Richtel wrote that the looming specter of web-based “zero-dollar” productivity applications going corporate may have something to do with MS’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo.

The conventional wisdom has been that the bid is part of Microsoft’s strategy to get access to Yahoo’s advertising and search network - but, Yahoo owns Zimbra (a really cool web-based collaboration platform), targeted at the enterprise, and an upstart competitor to Microsoft’s dominant Exchange Server. I’d guess that trying to acquire Yahoo may be one of the first hints that Microsoft is awaking to the threat that E2.0 applications like Team Edition pose to their Office / Outlook / Exchange hegemony.