The battle ground has been well and truly defined now and the first shots have been fired in the war between Google and Microsoft for top spot in cloud word processing and apps that will help your business to thrive. Google are designing their offering from the ground up and this is offering them great flexibility whereas Microsoft has over twenty years of experience and a customer base that has their products in their DNA and this is something that Google will be hard pushed to match.
From the research that we have done here at iPing, we have found that collaboration is and will be king in this war and this is something that Google is currently winning at. For example if a company has a number of people working on a Google Apps spread sheet, each user can see in real time what the other user is doing whereas this is not the case in the Microsoft offering. Each user in the Google offering is given a different colour and the cell they are typing in is highlighted and this is a handy feature that stops two or more people typing in the same cell.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is going to be massive in this war and for the two companies it is imperative that they get this right. This is now the first time in history that people in their personal lives are ahead of companies in their adoption of technology. In the past it was always companies that had the cutting edge technology. Some companies now expect their employees to be able to access their company technology on personal devices whereas other companies want to keep this all on company hardware. This is something that will need to be addressed and the two companies will need to make provisions for each access method.
Another thing that Microsoft and Google have marked as important in this battle is the ability for you to make video calls. Microsoft bought Skype and they are currently working frantically to improve its integration into their products to give voice and video capabilities. Google has developed Hangout that lets you make voice calls and also video calls to people that you are working with. This is something that will continue to grow over the next few years and will soon be as accepted as email.
At the moment it looks like Google is currently winning the early encounters on this war but there are many more battles remaining. Microsoft has shown time and again that once they decide they will become the best at something, they usually succeed. In the past they showed this with server operating systems, email servers and more recently the battle with Xbox and Sony PlayStation.