what about Intellectual Property and owning the rights to your work? Googles business model is data mining, and data mine their hosted solutions they do. Microsoft don't do this - their business model is to sell you the right to use a product, and what you do with it is your business.
Google scares me, whether it be their moniker (do no evil), or the fascade they hide behind (the coolness factor, anti-MS), the fact remains that they make money of your information and providing that to others, whether it be anonymously or not. I use google search on an hourly basis if not more, but I do so with the knowledge that my searches are mined and I don't really care. Most business cannot afford this luxury with internal documents, IP and the like.
Also, many organisations I know won't touch google docs for this very reason, and it's an important one. Regardless of features, in Australia I have seen many company go down the docs path due to cost, then return to the MS hosted path due to issues and lack of support. Microsoft is setup to support it's users, google relies on community support, with continual stories of no returned emails or no contact from those users that find themselves in trouble.
For these reasons, MS can justify a much larger price. The technical basis is such a small part of the puzzle - business cannot base itself on any product set that suffers these ills, without even factoring in the retraining costs and other costs of change.
I even had a contact at a lage US company that switched to docs advise they had a special agreement with google that their data wouldn't be mined / would be silo'd before going ahead. This alone gives me pause.
Information is really one of the last remaining valuable things left - if you give up the right to this, it is a scary world indeed. Nothing in life is free, it just gains value by other means - I can't believe this was ignored in this artical.
(however, I do agree that google docs is a great product, assuming the above doesn't bother you)
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