Guest post Louis Naugès is co-founder and chief cloud evangelist of international Google Apps integrator Revevol. Based in Paris, he blogs for ZDNet France and has translated an abridged version of this recent post for his second guest appearance here. Last year, his theme was Why Microsoft really, really hates the cloud. Read on for his equally provocative and partisan verdict on Microsoft’s newly launched cloud apps suite.
How the world has changed! In February 2007, Google launched Google Apps, its cloud based suite of communication and collaboration tools, in Europe and in the US.
Wind forward to June 2011, when Microsoft officially launched Office 365, its new offering ‘in the cloud’. Within a few days, dozens of articles and blogs were published, comparing the two offerings.
You know what hit me? Most coverage revolves around the theme: “Office 365, Microsoft’s answer to Google Apps.” In the space of just four years, the world has turned upside down. From a fringe competitor, Google Apps becomes the market leader, and Microsoft Office 365 is the challenger! It’s a strong indicator of the impact Google Apps has had in its young life.
Google anticipated this announcement with humor by posting a blog entitled 365 reasons to consider Google Apps. In line with its Web culture, Google used ‘crowdsourcing’ to establish this list of 365 reasons — the final list should be available soon.
For my part, to help organizations make an informed choice concerning their next ‘Social Computing solution in the Cloud’, I will set out below in the clearest possible terms the profound differences between Google Apps and Office 365.
Technology
Microsoft announced that their Office 365 solution is a “Cloud based” solution: Is that correct, technically?
The answer to that question is a clear: NO! Two key characteristics of a real Cloud solution are missing from Office 365:
1. Browser vs fat client. Yes, there is a “basic” version of Office 365 accessible from a browser, but for “serious work” you need the professional version, which necessitates the use of a Windows fat client, natively running Office 2010 and Outlook 2010. In comparison, full functionality in Google Apps is available through a browser on any PC, Macintosh, tablet or smartphone.
Not convinced? Ask the unfortunate CIOs who were tricked into deploying Microsoft BPOS in 2010, the precursor of Office 365. Microsoft is now telling them, quietly, that they will have to organize a full migration, within 12 months, from BPOS to Office 365. This is great news for Microsoft’s partners, who will pocket a lot of money managing these complex migrations. But for customers …
In contrast, even the oldest customers of Google Apps, such as Valeo and Revevol, who started working with this solution in 2007, never had to manage a single migration, despite continuous improvements; more than 100 innovations were added during 2010 alone.
I hope that any organization, and its CIO, who would still be tempted to migrate to Office 365 will have learned their lesson. They should start budgeting a migration to the next version of Office 365 — which may perhaps be named ‘Office 366′, to account for leap years. I would not want to be the CIO who has to explain to C-level managers, the finance department and all users that an additional migration is needed.
