Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live- Comparitive Study
In my last post I wrote about how to configure and use Google Apps for your domain. Office Live is the direct competition to Google Apps from Microsoft. Both of them have free versions and premium versions targeted for different sections. Even though the two services are targeted towards similar audiences, there are some very specific differences. Lets do a comparative study of the features.
Microsoft Office Live Basics: Basics is the free version from Microsoft Office Live. The free version has the following features,
- Microsoft Office Live Basics includes one FREE domain name for your business.
- Access your mails, calenders, tasks etc. Allows to create 25 free email accounts with your domain and each email having 2GB of space.
- Easy-to-use Web site design tools.
- 500 MB of Web site storage space.
- Web site reports tool to analyze your traffic.
Now coming to the comparison with Google Apps,
- Microsoft Office Live Basics gives you a free domain whereas Google Apps provides domain at 10$ from GoDaddy.
- Google Apps allows you to create unlimited accounts whereas Office live Basics allows only 25 accounts for free version.
- Microsoft Office Live would work well when all users run Windows, have copies of Microsoft Office, and use the latest versions of Internet Explorer whereas Google Apps can run on all OS and browsers (covers most of the popular ones). I tried to register for Office Live through Firefox and got an error message that Firefox is not supported.
- Office Live has an excellent user interface when compared to Google’s basic HTML pages.
- Office Live is available only for US, UK, France, Japan and Germany users, while Google Apps is available throughout the world (I could not register with Office Live because of this).
- A valid credit card is required to complete the sign up process for Office Live. Although they don’t charge any amount for free version, they use it for authentication. Google Apps does not require any credit card for sign up.
- The premium version of Google Apps cost around 50$ per user per year, whereas Office live costs you 19.95$ per month and it allows to create 50 users.
I feel if Office Live is available for all locations, then it would definitely give competition to Google Apps as it has good features and design and also the fact that unlimited accounts from Google Apps may not be useful for common users. The only major worrying fact about Office Live is fact that only Internet Explorer 6 and above is supported.
If you like to add any more comparison, please share it in comments.
Share & Enjoy
Aug 20th, 2007 at 4:35 am
A good comparision.
Looking at it from my personal perspective; No Firefox support kills Office Live, there and then! and on top of that the credit card being required, buries it finally.
If you notice, as an observation, recently a whole load of email spam has been generated pointing to apparently real websites, created on Office Live. It’s free, so anyone can go in, enter a credit card (begged, borrowed or stolen) and get a free domain, on Microsoft. All this gives an element of credibility to such spurious websites.
Aug 20th, 2007 at 9:40 am
@RJ,
Well said, Without Firefox support it can’t compete Google Apps. I never knew about this email spam from Office Live, but your concern is correct, anyone can get a free domain using some credit card.
Aug 20th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Ah! that’s a nice difference. I agree that office live will make more impact, if at all they work on few things…the ones you’ve mentioned.
Aug 20th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
INterface, the biggest thing to develop pages, If they have so great features then it might be the fist choice for professionals, But google might come with something great by seeing a handsome amount of competition from MS
Aug 20th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Microsoft have always made it a point to force the use of IE6+ for any user who needs a service from their site. That, probably is the only way they are going to boost up their dwindling IE numbers
Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
I would go for Microsoft Office Live Basics only if it starts supporting all the browsers. Otherwise, Google is the best!
Aug 20th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
@Vaibhav,
If you are more interested towards UI design, then Microsoft is better.
@Vijay,
Microsoft planning to make IE popular by this way, but this wont be successful unless Office live is that good. Lets wait and see.
@Harris,
Agree with you.
Aug 21st, 2007 at 6:06 am
As Mayank said
, Google is charging on spot but Microsoft is asking for credit card information for incase of emergency! So what is exactly the emergency? 
Aug 21st, 2007 at 9:52 am
@Rishi,
The emergency could be attributed to the fact that the free domain could be misused to spam. In that case they would be able to track the person if he has used a valid credit card.
Aug 29th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Attempting to sign-up to MOLB was a nightmare: it wouldn’t take my Visa credit card, so I passed on it….
Sep 7th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
its really amazing that what i upload in google ,microsoft shows something different
Sep 16th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
different colors,different text in google and microsoft
http://www.mytailorstore.com
Sep 28th, 2007 at 12:48 am
I really do not understand why we need to have multi-browser support in order to update the site. Of course, the multi-browser support is required for the deployed site.
Why can’t we use IE to administer the site created using Office Live. I love office live because the domain is free and they have some good tools for the site too.
Jan 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 am
We http://www.fastercats.com have been customizing and deploying Open Office Suite 2.x using Google Docs for much the same thing… without the restrictions imposed by Microsoft’s licensing policy…
Karl A. Krogmann
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