The statement in the title requires some additional explanation, as most such claims do. First, the sample size of the polling data is far too small and self-selected for any meaningful result... twelve out of ninety of the TechRepublic's CIO Jury panel (even had all ninety replied it might not have meant much). Second, the use of the word trust is found here in perhaps an uncommon application of the term; it's a bit like saying "I can trust my old beater's brakes to fail just as I am coming up on a stop light, every time." It's more an indication of predictability than positive faith; no one sounded ready to get into a falling/catching exercise with Microsoft, they just felt that, after decades of dealing with the company, they had some idea what they might expect and with Google there is no such track record.

I feel much the same. Microsoft absolutely isn't a company you can trust in conventional terms; the spin is relentless, the marketing and legal departments have long since displaced the embarrassingly honest geeks in providing information on upcoming products and services, and unless you know someone over there from who you can get the real scoop, it's best to just wait and see what happens instead of taking the company at its word... in other words, instead of trusting it in the conventional sense. But that nonetheless adds up to a sort of trust; at least we all know now what to discount and how, generally, to read the tea leaves in their public statements to gain some measure of predictability in the company. My own formula is to look for the most part at where the company is making money and to apply the particular horizon of analysis and perspective on the industry that Microsoft executives seem to have and predict what they will do based on that, rather than on any public pronouncements.

Google has no such track record and no such stability. And if I apply the same formula to them, it's more difficult to see how they ever will. Microsoft's bread is buttered by business use, and they know it. Google's revenues come from advertising, and it's not clear that they are serious or need to be serious about business users. Applying a long enough horizon to their outlook and you can see where they might need to become so at some point, but it's not clear yet that leadership at Google has that sort of horizon, or perspective. It's a vast, gaping unknown. There are certain product lines and efforts I am comfortable relying on based on my understanding of their motivations, but there is more uncertainty than certainty. As poll respondent Donna Trivison, Director of IT for Ursuline College, put it:

There seems to be some conventional wisdom that Google is the answer to what’s been wrong over the years in the Microsoft universe. That kind of thinking may be dangerous. As consumers of technology we need to keep each and every business partner honest and working for us. Handing trust carte blanche over to Google because, as the wisdom goes, they are good citizens, seems misguided to me. If I had to pick one, it would probably be Microsoft because they have withstood the scrutiny their misdeeds have landed them. Google remains, for the most part, untested.

That's exactly correct; just because Google isn't Microsoft doesn't mean they are any better, and the fact that they haven't been around long and haven't been delivering corporate services for any time at all means it is impossible to gauge whether they ever will be.

Many respondents who picked Microsoft in fact indicated that it was a "Better the devil you know" sort of choice, and that's not a bad sort of choice to make. Still, there also seemed to me to be a lot of attribution to Google of qualities that were more perceived than real and little of the hard cost/benefit analysis put into their motives that one should engage in with any business partner. So does that mean that Microsoft is simply getting the vote because it is a name better known in enterprise IT, the same way that politicians get votes because they have more yard signs out and not because of their positions? Quite possibly. "The devil you know" is human nature; attributing some devilish tendencies to the angel you don't know seems to be part and parcel of that tendency.

More quotes and information can be found in Jason Hiner's original post.