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By Jason Slater
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Microsoft and Google, two of the largest technology companies around, are in a race to provide web services. Both have their particular strengths but in many areas both provide similar services including calendaring applications, website building tools, and analytics but who is winning and who is trailing behind?
Who provides the better services?
This struck me as an interesting thought experiment so I took 38 factors including search, start page, email, gaming, translation, office applications and storage. For each factor 1 point was awarded to whoever I felt has the edge in a particular area, and as such reached a somewhat surprising result.
Download the PDF to see the result.
Microsoft vs Google (322)What do you think? Who do you think is out in front?
Related
- Starting out with Google Apps
- Understanding RESTful Web Services
- Looking Closer At Email Security, Contingency and Archiving Services
- MOSS: Shared Services Provider
- Sharepoint Services 3 continued…
I wonder how that would change if Microsoft purchased Yahoo?
Jamie
Jason, I thought this comparison was fascinating. The score method could be expanded to prioritize those features which are more important than others on a scale. Also, it assumes that “sharing” in certain circumstances is an asset. While this is true of social networking, it is also true that one must have a way to block unwanted interaction. It may or may not be true about a business model, depending on whether one is trying to market something or safeguard information and both may be necessary for the same customer at different times. I thought that Writer was overlooked as a fabulous tool for Microsoft, even though I wish it could be expanded some to include aspects of Word without the complexity, memory, load times and “hackability” of Word. It has the potential to really change the landscape of writing and pasting as it develops and you can resize photos with it which is really helpful. Also, I find analytics to be really quite surprising for my Microsoft website and it was easy to build and more importantly to find it online. With these in the mix the two are about 19 to 19, a tie. The one missing category was security and that is what I will wait to see an article about from you! Without security, which involves so much more than the computer hardware and software, all of these wonderful features for both Google and Microsoft are time consuming. I have both just in case I experience a problem with the other one, making password management worse than my old address book and junk mail worse than telemarketers. Your focus on ease of use to save time was exactly right. Lastly, the next advancements in hardware are going to really spice up the industry. I am closely watching the hardware race and integrating SSD Solid State and USB 3.0. Bench tests are fast now. Software could very well move quickly onto hardware, making the security net services the most valuable value added service application and telco competition and price drops the most important legislative move by both European and US populations. Asian domination of the hardware however will translate to a loss of wealth and people will be forced to work from home in a very crowded marketplace of worthless ideas…due to a lack of data security.
It would be an interested mix Jamie – I originally had a column for Yahoo on the chart and it was going to be three horse race but I couldn’t find the level of service diversity that Google and MS have. Another potential to watch our for in the future could be Adobe.
Femtobeam, I am a fan of Live Writer too – it really is a handy application – and thanks for the heads up about security – something I am going to look into a lot closer.