Google Looking for 365 Reasons To Choose Google Apps
In the time-honored tech tradition of raining on a competitor's parade, the Google Apps team attacked Office 365 in a blog post the day before Microsoft launched its cloud offering.
The post, "365 reasons to consider Google Apps," went up on the Official Google Enterprise Blog on Monday. The post, written by Shan Sinha, Google Apps product manager, actually boiled down to four arguments:
- "Office 365 is for individuals. Apps is for teams."
- "Office 365 is built for Microsoft. Apps is built for choice."
- "Office 365 is 11 different plans, three editions and two tiers. Apps is $5/month with no commitment."
- "Office 365 is about the desktop. Apps is about the web."
For the remaining 361 reasons, Google has put out a couple of Twitter requests for ammunition from its partner and customer community and the suggestions have been rolling in. In the meantime, the blog entry has a comparison chart of Google Apps against the five main flavors of Office 365 that's actually pretty useful.
Google's main points aren't unfair, but they seem aimed at portraying the strengths of the Microsoft offering -- its flexibility, its acknowledgement of users' online/offline reality and its integration with the dominant installed desktop productivity suite -- as weaknesses.
More than 24 hours later, still no response from Microsoft's competitive bulldogs over at the Why Microsoft blog. Maybe they're comfortable letting Office 365 speak for itself?
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Posted by Scott Bekker on June 29, 2011