Google in preemptive strike on Microsoft Office 365

Google Apps product manager Shan Sinha was once director of strategy for Microsoft SharePoint, Redmond's longstanding effort to facilitate business collaboration over the net. Sinha left Microsoft in the fall of 2007 to create DocVerse, a service that bypassed SharePoint, plugging Microsoft Office customers into Google Apps. Sharepoint, Sinha says, just wasn't working.

"Lots of people seemed to be adopting SharePoint, nevertheless few were as a matter of fact using it, " he tells The Register. "SharePoint was one of Microsoft's fastest growing business...yet as it turns out, end users found it too complicated. It was too limited in how you could to tell the truth share documents and files."

Sinha's story is a convenient metaphor for Google's enterprise business in the aggregate. Google isn't just taking on Microsoft. It's turning Microsoft's aging Office business against itself.

In addition to plugging Microsoft Office into Google Apps via Cloud Connect, Google has turned Gmail into a Microsoft Exchange backup service. It's offering a plug-in that transforms Outlook into a Gmail client. And, now, as Microsoft prepares to launch its latest online business productivity service - Office 365 - Mountain has called on Sinha to tell the world why the new Redmond suite pales in comparison to Google Apps.

Office 365 is a subscription service offering hosted versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, the Redmond platform that combines IM, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and video conferencing. The service as well includes access to Microsoft's Office Web Apps - versions of Microsoft desktop customers that can be used from a browser - nevertheless these offer a in other words limited set of tools. Office 365 is primarily meant for use with Microsoft's desktop Office suite. Some Office 365 plans to tell the truth include subscriptions to a version of desktop Office.

"Innovation inevitably gets more complicated as it gets older. Upgrading platforms and adding features results in systems that are increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use," Sinha's blog post reads. "Sometimes like these, it's worth considering a clean-slate: an approach based on absolutely modern technologies, designed for today's world."

The biggest difference's between Google

"One of the biggest difference's between Google and Microsoft from a hosted standpoint has as a matter of fact been the reliability of the suite," says Michael Cohn, the chief executive of Cloud Sherpas, a company dedicated to facilitating the use of Google Apps and that has moved myriad business off of Microsoft tools. "Outages that Microsoft BPOS [the precursor to 365] has been incurring - both scheduled and unscheduled - has proven that whereas Microsoft has proven it can build enterprise software, it's not necessary as good as even some of their partners in hosting software."

Sinha as well argues for the simplicity of Mountain View's pricing structure. Google Apps sells for $5 per user per month - or $50 per user year - whereas Microsoft offers three separate "editions" of Office 365 and 11 different pricing plans. Some include desktop software, others don't. "The Office 365 licensing schemas are traditional Microsoft. It's very difficult to understand," says Michael Cohn. "Once you start comparing apples to apples, I don't think the cost of Microsoft's suite is all that attractive."

Office 365 continues Microsoft's move onto the web, however this move is only partial. Microsoft is shifting to a direct model, yet it's in spite of everything hoping to keep its existing resellers happy. As Sinha admits, Microsoft has "inertia" on its side - so many businesses will use Microsoft only because they've used it in the past - nevertheless Redmond is as well burdened by the old client-server model that was sold through the channel. Still you slice it, this comes with added costs - and added hassles.

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