Last week, Google announced the release of its latest creation, Labs for Google Apps, a set of experimental tools for Apps users. Labs allows businesses and schools to try out freshly-created Apps features and provide feedback before the final release.

The concepts of experimentation and rapid adoption cycles are often frowned upon in enterprise technology. However Google is determined to change the way businesses view technological progress with Labs for Google Apps.

“Here at Google we believe that experimentation is a good thing - even in the enterprise space. Some of our best ideas have emerged from experiments.” says Apps Product Manager Gabe Cohen in his blog post on Labs for Google Apps.

Eventually the platform will be open to third-party developers to build applications for the many businesses using Apps.

For those concerned with the reliability of Google Apps due to several service outages in the last few months, Google announced a new 99.9% service level agreement for GMail and all other Apps features as well.

With the economy in poor condition, Google has the unique opportunity to move offline office suite users over to the less expensive cloud. Companies that have been bound to Microsoft and IBM for years may be difficult to sway, but if Google can prove that Apps is the innovative, reliable service that everyone needs, they may have a decent shot.