Google and Salesforce.com have announced an integration, where a company can use Google's mail, calendar, and instant messaging platform together in an integrated fashion with Salesforce.com's other offerings. Now chat and email conversations with customers will thread into the rest of the Salesforce data. Though this is already available for Microsoft Outlook, putting out a web-based offering means that the underlying OS and other desktop applications don't matter as much.
According to details on News.com, this integration came from user requests. What's interesting is that this will be offered for free to SalesForce.com users, which means the barriers to moving to web-based office applications just weakened even more. If you could shave the cost of an operating system and an office software suite from your desktop environment at work (replacing it with a Linux flavor like Ubuntu and web-based applications), would you?