Google Apps Sticks the Boot into Microsoft's Office 365

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jun 28, 2011

After months of squabbling between Google and Microsoft over Office 365 and Google Docs, things finally came to a head today with the official, general release of Office 365 by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in New York.

It’s not that the two have been verbally ferocious with each other — that’s not really Google’s style —but Google has been piling on the pressure with weekly, even daily upgrades to Google Docs and Apps in the run up to the event.

Pricing or Functionality?

Sifting through the overly complicated pricing of Office 365 — it offers three different editions and numerous pricing plans, which boil down to about US$ 6 per user/month — with Office 365, Microsoft is going after the SMB market among others, the very space where Google Apps has been hawking its wares since the beginning.

Google Apps, on the other hand, works out at US$ 5 per user/month, or US$ 50 per user/year, which while providing a significant enough price difference with Office 365, is probably not so great that it will become the principal concern of those weighing up the benefits of one over the other.

Functionality

It is really in the functionality that it is going to count, and there is no question that Office 365, on paper at least, offers a lot more, including SharePoint online and Lync, but this may not swing companies either way.

It has been pointed out before, for example, that SharePoint is probably too big and cumbersome for small businesses, which, generally speaking, are looking for productivity tools, many of which are available in Apps already.

Office 365 vs. Google Apps Flexibility

Whether App is flexible enough to cater to all business needs depends on who you’re talking to, with many pointing out flaws in Apps such as the lack of offline support — Google swears this will be ready this summer — or even issues with the user interface.

The flip side of this is that Office 365 doesn’t allow for third-party integration, which is going to be a problem, especially as Google Docs has been able to team up with the likes of Box, and there is probably some who are concerned about outages with BPOS, the precursor to Office 365, over the past months.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? Again, it depends on where you’re standing, whom you’re talking to and what you’re looking for. On this, we’ll take a rain check; it’s easy enough to find flaws and advantages in both.

Google vs. Microsoft

That hasn’t stopped Google from issuing a pre-Office 365 salvo in the direction of Microsoft; what former US president Ronald Reagan used to call a preemptive counter attack — a euphemism for striking hard before the enemy can.

The strike in question came from Shan Sinha, a former director of strategy for Microsoft SharePoint, and now Google Apps Product Manager via DocVerse, which Google bought last February.