I was chatting with a friend of mine who works for Microsoft over the weekend and the topic of online office suites came up and he voiced the opinion that Office Live Workspaces, as such things go, beat the pants off of Google Apps. Further questioning elicited the fact that he was merely echoing internal propaganda dispensed by Ballmer and hadn't actually used either offering himself. Now, my friend is not (at least privately) a drink the koolaid kind of guy-a previous part of this same conversation had been about our general agreement that Vista is a dog that no right-thinking person should subject their computer to at this stage, or perhaps ever. So it surprised me a bit to hear this from him, particularly in view of the fact that I had not, myself, considered Office Live and Google Apps to be in any sort of direct competition.

I use Apps regularly but have only poked around at Office Live, but Apps is actually an online office suite, and Live is essentially hosted Sharepoint. A better comparison might be made between Office Live and Jotspot, or whatever Jotspot is becoming now that Google owns it, or between Office Live and the rumored "Gdrive" online storage product that Google has long been expected to roll out.

From what I have been able to find of Ballmer's public comments, he doesn't really view Apps as competition either. So I'm curious if this was just a misunderstanding, or if it's been spun differently internally at Microsoft for some reason-to provoke some fighting instincts among the troops, perhaps?

It seems to me, though, that the market for Apps is much broader than Live Workspaces, and the battle for hearts and minds is happening elsewhere. Corporations already have Sharepoint; Live Workspaces does nothing for them and it's unlikely that Microsoft would want to cannibalize their server market share to transition customers between the two (this is a fundamental obstacle for their move into almost any SaaS space, although we'll see how it goes when they roll out their hosted Exchange services).

Apps, on the other hand, has certainly been tested largely in the same realm that Live is aiming for (the small business or individual user) but seems aimed for expansion toward the larger corporation that sees the advantages of utility computing and actively wants to be rid of the overhead of servers like Sharepoint and complex desktop apps like Office.

I keep saying that I don't think that Google is really trying to compete with Microsoft on Office, or in many other areas where pundits are trying to portray a fight, and this really what I am getting at when I say it: if Google and Microsoft are in competition, it is not in the realm of specific applications or services, but rather over philosophies and conceptions of IT. In that sense, they are both really very much going their own route with all of these offerings and trusting to their vision of corporate computing's future and paying a lot less attention to competing on products than most people seem to realize.