Microsoft vs. Google: Making Sense of Cloud-Based Office Suites
Back in the mid-1990s, office suites were a hot new idea. Just about every business wanted in on the action-and every business had to begin by choosing between Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite, and WordPerfect. Nobody liked to admit it, but all three products were pretty darn similar, in part because they all borrowed each others' best features.
And then Microsoft came to dominate the market, and most companies stopped pondering which suite to get. For better or worse, they bought the same one everyone else did: Office.
The vast majority of businesses still run on Office. For the first time in eons, however, choosing an office suite is once again a real decision. That's because it's no longer a given that outfitting your company involves installing a few gigabytes of productivity software on all of your company's PCs and (in many cases) setting up servers to handle email, document management, and other centralized jobs. Today, you can skip that cost and complexity by opting for a cloud-based suite. If you do, you'll probably end up comparing Microsoft's new Office 365 against Google's relatively venerable Google Apps.
This time around, you're not deciding between lookalike products. Microsoft and Google agree that cloud-based suites involve browser-based apps and hosted services that replace local software and servers, and they both charge a monthly per-user fee-as little as $6 for Office 365 and $5 for Google Apps. (Apps even has a free edition, good for up to 10 users.) But the two suites are strikingly different, and they reflect the biases of the companies that created them.
As with many a Microsoft product before it, Office 365 is difficult to describe concisely. What it isn't is the fully Web-based version of Microsoft Office that you might expect. Yes, there are online versions of Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint, which Microsoft calls the Office Web Apps. They look pretty and handle files created with the traditional Office apps with aplomb. But overall, they feel limited and even unfinished: There's no way to draw a simple square or circle in PowerPoint, for instance.
Microsoft would clearly be just as happy if you continued paying for and using Office in one of its conventional editions -- possibly Office Home and Office 2010, which goes for $279.99. (For $24 per user per month, there's an Enterprise version of Office 365 that includes licenses for Office Professional Plus, but Microsoft says this plan is for companies with more than 25 employees. I'm not sure why it thinks us folks in smaller outfits wouldn't be interested.)
That's not to say that Office 365 isn't without its attractions. Even the $6-per-user-per-month version gives everybody 25GB of email storage managed by a Web-hosted version of Exchange, Microsoft's mail server. They also get access to SharePoint Online, which lets you store all of your company's documents in one central repository so that everyone can get to them from any Internet-connected PC. And they can use Lync Online, a unified-communications system that provides Internet phone calls, instant messaging, and Web conferencing features.
In the past, if you wanted Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync, you'd probably get it by purchasing servers and software, and paying an employee or a consultant to set them up and tend to them -- a process that's pricey and intimidating enough that plenty of smaller businesses didn't seriously contemplate it in the first place.
Conceptually, Google Apps is far simpler than Office 365. Google has no desktop software business to defend, so it puts everything in the cloud: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, documents, and all the server software you might otherwise need to wrangle them. Its Web-based productivity programs aren't anywhere near as powerful as Microsoft's desktop versions of Office, but they're far more mature than the Office Web Apps, with fewer notable missing features. (The collaborative tools are particularly well-done.) And the Google Apps Marketplace offers a bevy of business tools that integrate with Google's offerings-accounting, CRM, email marketing managers, and much more.
If I was forced to run my business on a cloud-based suite and could never use PC software again, I'd choose Apps over Office 365 in a heartbeat.
As with Microsoft's suite, however, there's a major catch: Putting everything in the cloud only works if everybody in your business has uninterrupted Internet access. Which they probably don't, especially if any of them go out into the world with a laptop in tow. (I'm still not clear what the Google employees who use Apps do when they're on flights without Wi-Fi -- maybe they kick back and read a good magazine.) Google says that it's working on technology that will let Apps work without an Internet connection; it'll provide only basic functionality, not the array of features that are available when you're online.
In the end, Office 365 is worth investigating if you're a mostly-happy Microsoft customer who wants to avoid the hassle of running your own servers. Google Apps is an intriguing option if you're ready to shed old-fashioned software altogether. Or you could do what I do in my own small business: Split the difference. I prefer the simplicity of Google Apps' word processor to any flavor of Microsoft Word, butI wouldn't dream of creating a presentation in anything but the PC-based incarnation PowerPoint. So I use 'em both, and mix and match other Office and Google apps as my needs and preferences demand.
I'm still waiting for the cloud-based suite of my fantasies. It would provide most of the power of conventional Microsoft Office without making you install anything. It would work with or without an Internet connection. It would meld the file-format savvy of the Office Web Apps with the team-oriented features of Google Apps. I don't know whether Microsoft or Google (or an upstart competitor like Zoho) will get there first, but I'm ready to fork over my money the moment it arrives -- and I'll bet a lot of small businesses will join me.
