Microsoft has been trying to promote Office 365 as a better solution for businesses over Google Apps, including some recent video promotions starring Rob Schneider as "Google Docs". This week, Microsoft continued their campaign against Google"s office software solution with a blog post written by people who have had experience in installing Office 365 in many different companies.
The post was authored by Sean McNeill, Cloud Services Specialist, and John Santiago, General Manager, at Catapult Systems, described by Microsoft as a company that works with mid and large businesses to provide "application development, enterprise solutions and infrastructure services." Their blog post says that they have recently seen many of their customers "flee Google Apps for Office 365." That apparently includes three unnamed companies in the last six months that have between 400 and 1,200 users.
McNeill and Santiago describe one specific incident at a company where an executive assistant was using Outlook on her own instead of her company"s assigned Google Apps:
When we told her we were there to help her company move back to Office, her reaction was, "Thank God!" She wasn"t the only one. After using Google Apps for a month, employees across the organization were exerting so much pressure on the IT department that the company decided to switch to Office 365.
Some of the reasons cited by McNeill and Santiago for ditching Google Apps for Office 365 include losing their designed format on Word and Excel files, paying extra for third party tools not included with Google Apps and simply missing the use of Microsoft Outlook.
Of course, this post was written on the official Microsoft Office blog, so it"s a tad bias, but it once again illustrates that Microsoft is continuing to hammer away at Google as the two companies compete for the huge audience that is looking for a cloud software suite.
Source: Microsoft