TechCrunch has an article on the just-launched Google Pages, which is an AJAX-fronted website creation tool. Nik Cubrilovic includes the following in his post:

I am not sure who this is targeted at as the small business owners and non technical folk sure aren’t looking at Google for a website solution and considering there is no domain mapping at the moment being a business and handing out a googlepages.com domain is just, well, embarrassing.

Warning brutal rant:

I assume small business owners in the US are more self-aware than they are in the UK. I’m constantly amazed by the number of UK businesses that make zero investment in their support tools, processes and infrastructure. Decent web sites, domain names, e-mail addresses, accounting packages, CRM tools, management techniques, process management and optimisation, quality control, etc.. all of these takes a back seat compared with their main activities. What’s more shocking is that it doesn’t seem to affect them. British society seems clueless when it comes to expectations of service or product, and if you hit many of them over the head with Quality, it just doesn’t make any difference.