Your employees use Google all day long anyay, so why not extend the familiar interface and capability to your entire enterprise. It’s not a question.
This is one more feather in Google’s search dominance cap. (God, what an awful metaphor. I might as well have said “Google puts on gay search pants.”)
Google is going to make a killing in a few months/years when it begins to charge companies for value-added services, such as consolidating their employees’ entire search histories (extranet and intranet), or analyzing trend data on private searches. There’s an incredible aftermarket for doing private Google zeitgeists just waiting to be capitalized on.
Remember the halcyon days when Baseline was KPMG? And by halcyon, I mean “not reporting a net loss of $546 million.” Anyway, here’s Baseline magazine’s timeline of the change and a feature on how the company lost its way.