By Mark O’Neill

Mr William Gates is probably cursing in his Cheerios at the moment. A company called Cemaphore Systems has announced the launch of a new product that will allow Gmail users to completely do away with their Microsoft Exchange servers and run Microsoft Outlook directly from Google servers instead.

Called Mailshadow for Google Apps, it is already being hailed by industry analysts as the product that will make Gmail skyrocket. Since a lot of businesses operate on Outlook, using Mailshadow to synchronise email, address books and calendars will encourage a lot more people to use Gmail and Outlook together for work.

Google has offered Outlook access to Gmail for quite a while, but it seems that Mailshadow is the first product to offer across-the-board synchronization for email, address books and calendars between Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

What do you think? Is this something you would use?