Google Apps vs Microsoft Office

In last night’s IS 6100 lec­ture, I men­tioned Google Apps. This is a free web-based appli­ca­tion suite that offers email, cal­en­dar, con­tacts, word pro­cess­ing and spread­sheet func­tions. No soft­ware instal­la­tion is required, other than a Web browser like Fire­fox or Inter­net Explorer.

Accord­ing to this Yahoo arti­cle and this Google site, Google will offer a busi­ness ver­sion of this suite for US$50 per seat per year. This ver­sion includes cus­tomiza­tion, sup­port for spe­cific domain names in e-mail addresses, and 10 GB of hosted stor­age per seat.

Google is aim­ing squarely at Microsoft Office, which is a major cash cow for Microsoft. Busi­nesses that don’t need a full office suite on every employee’s hard drive can save money by using Google’s web-based apps. Google updates its soft­ware on its own servers, as it is oper­at­ing as an appli­ca­tion ser­vice provider (ASP), so Microsoft Update isn’t needed to patch the apps.

Google also offers an edu­ca­tion ver­sion for uni­ver­si­ties. A uni­ver­sity like HPU could offer stu­dents Gmail with an hpu.edu e-mail address. Google Apps allows users to share and edit DOC and XLS files, which would be very handy for group projects.

Finally, there are var­i­ous free office suites avail­able, includ­ing OpenOf­fice. Some of these require instal­la­tion to a hard drive. I pre­fer web-based solu­tions, even when they don’t sup­port Pow­er­Point files.

Tagged as: ASP, Google, Microsoft, mobile, office, PPT, software, university