Microsoft has given Google Apps the ultimate compliment, they started going after it on YouTube. This past week Microsoft has posted a new series of YouTube videos under their “officevideos” channel. The video “Titles Why Microsoft: Microsoft Compared to Google – Total Value Overview” Microsoft makes some claims about how Google Apps does not provide an entire solution and is too “one size fits all”. Microsoft is right, with products like Microsoft Business Productivity Online Solution (BPOS) you can easily work with other Microsoft Products like Dynamics for CRM. However when looking at it at a higher level Microsoft does not so easily allow for integration with other 3rd party products.
Google Apps provides organization with the API’s and tools they need to use Google Apps with the 3rd party solutions of their choice. Also out of the box Google Apps ties in nicely with many 3rd party solutions like Salesforce.com CRM. Also as Google Apps provides an open environment where customers can use the Google Apps API’s they can create the perfect solution for their organization, it is no longer I use Microsoft because I have to.
Ahnother point made by the YouTube series is that with Google Apps you get a one size fits all solutions where your only option is the cloud where with Microsoft you can use a mix of on premise and cloud services. If you take a look at some very large organizations like universities they are using a mixed environment where you have the option of using Google Apps (which many of their users do) or staying with whatever their existing solution was.
I have put together a quick comparison of Google Apps and Microsoft’s cloud service Business Productivity Online Solution. While both are now offering a lot of the same features one of the big differences is that Google’s solution is built around a base of making collaborating and communicating easier and more efficient while Microsoft still seems to be forcing collaboration features into its exisiting solution. Another big difference is cost, Microsoft is still much more expensive and to show that difference I used some very real world example that many small businesses could relate to. The best part of this whole marketing effort is that Microsoft is using the best medium they could think of to reach their audience, Google’s YouTube.
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