Recently a friend of my that works for MS sent me THIS document which was produced by Microsoft as a sort of "white paper" comparing Microsoft's hosted services to Google App's hosted services. Here were my reflections/reactions to the document.

Peace,

Ryan

I found this to be an informative document. As with technology, and with Google's rapid product development, some information is no longer correct.

I believe that Microsoft’s strong points are its full functionality. However, I would argue that few people, not even me, use MS Office products to their full functionality. Most features simply go unused because of lack of training and/or need.

I’m just excited that someone (Mainly Google) has “lit a fire” under Microsoft. I don’t believe we would be this far down the road with cloud computing or SAS if it were not for companies like Google forcing the innovation of ideas.

Something rather important that I found missing from the document was a true cost analysis. MS repeatedly  insinuated that their product was the best value when cost,  functionality, setup, and upkeep were all weighted, but failed to ever show how in dollars and cents. Matter of fact (a word on every page) the article never lists actual costs.

For more complicated office productivity, desktop software is still currently necessary. However, I believe that desktop software will soon be a thing of the past and Microsoft should get on board. Both products still depend on desktop applications if a user needs to do the more complex productivity activities. Google is not going to develop desktop software applications, and thus will spend all its energy in making web apps capable of doing what is currently only possible with desktop apps. Which, in my opinion, poses Google to get there first.

Now, scalability is defiantly an important category. And I don’t mean either company’s ability to host large organizations, but being able to bridge the gap from where they (the organization) are now to the cloud. This document makes the assumption that almost everyone is currently using MS products (maybe true). And it seems that they are currently bridging the gap most effectively for those organizations which are heavily embedded in MS technology. The document also make it look like a nightmare to convert organizations from XYZ to Google apps (maybe so). However, I’d be interested to see why companies with thousands of users have chosen Google and made the transition? One suspicion that I would make is that their computing needs are not as sophisticated as the services the MS apps provide.

In conclusion I’d just like to semi-repeat something I’ve already said. Thank goodness for competition – it’s one of the key ingredients of innovation.