Cloudy Times Ahead: MS Office 2010 Takes To The Clouds Against Google

The Google vs Microsoft battle is an old one. While Google rules the web Microsoft has ruled the desktop office software business for many a years. Since last 5 years though Google has made strides in what one calls cloud based office productivity products. Most famous being Google docs. This has made Google and Microsoft compete harder and trends have started showing that even office productivity tools are moving towards the web.

A survey by IDC confirmed the shift towards cloud when19.5% of the respondents were in organisations that used Google Docs in some form which is up from 5.8% a year earlier. This may also be due to the integration of Google docs with Gmail in attachments as a default viewer. Hence Google seems to be intelligently penetrating this market using its clout as the worlds largest search engine and also one of the worlds larger providers of free email service in gmail.

But it seems Microsoft has taken a firm step into the cloud by recently launching its Office 2010 product. The Office 2010 suite includes Web Apps which means users can store documents centrally and access them on demand just like Google Docs and Zoho.
Microsoft bundles the new edition of Office 2010 with features that enable users to embed videos inppts and do voice-to-text conversion for voice mails on Outlook. The new edition also allows multiple user collaboration on the same document hence different people can connect and edit documents in real-time.

Our take on Microsoft vs Google Cloud Battle

We feel corporates in India atleast are less likely to take chances with Google docs and are likely to adopt the new features in Office 2010 for the web collaboration needs. The early adoptors though will be the ones that are likely to drive usage for Google cloud services. I also believe that Google needs to work on its cloud services and come up with exciting features that lets one do more online with the documents that one creates. Its also a matter of time as the internet penetration grows one does expect more and more people to move towards the cloud.