Interesting conversation... although all I see here are pretty blatant attacks at Andrew, when he's presenting clearly available information that's pretty easy to decipher.

I know we've had lots of customers move to BPOS (admittedly generally from on-premise rather than from another cloud solution) and very few using G Apps. BPOS certainly has it's problems, and no question there has been frustrating downtime - but it's pretty hard to submit that either of those is more/worse than Google - especially when the data contradicts that. Anecdotal evidence like "bogus, self-calculated "minutes of downtime" statistics that any Google Apps customer will tell you aren't reality." don't do much other than suggest posturing.

Anyway, looking forward to seeing the changes I've heard announced for BPOS, including better control panel integration for BES (would be great to not have to submit tickets for everything). At the moment, I can clearly see the value proposition, and I love this quote from BPOS customer Rexel:

"Frankly, the Google value proposition is cost based, and once you take that away, what’s left?"

- Olivier Baldassari, Chief Information Officer, Rexel

@Andrewk Good summation.     As a user of both Google and BPOS I can say that your assessment is fairly balanced.   One thing that I would like to add and is an oversight that I have seen numerous times, is a failure to include information about Google Apps Engine.  There is a separate dashboard for Engine  code.google.com/.../appengine

When comparing the entire package of BPOS/Azure with Apps/Apps Engine, the SLA and downtime metrics look to be even more skewed in favor of Microsoft.    In fact, there is no SLA for Engine.  

Am I reading this right...China Navigation haven't even implemented BPOS yet!?!

"Loh estimates that it will take the IT team about two to three days to set up the server and complete the technical settings, such as the transfer of domain names. Once that is done, he expects the actual rollout to the company’s 300 users to be completed within a day."

www.microsoft.com/.../Case_Study_Detail.aspx

A case study about a customer that hasn't even deployed your software yet? This reeks of desperation!

Postini has its own SLA and is not included in the Google Apps SLA. When looking at the incidents, not all affected the Premier Edition. For example on 6-9-2010, the Calendar problem did no effect the Premier accounts.

As an authorized Reseller for both Postini and Google Apps Premier, none of our clients have experienced the same outages, even our own Premier account (since July 2007) has yet to be affected by any major outages. I am not discounting that there was service downtime for some; nonetheless, it is part of the life cycle of this industry.

The value of Google Apps in my opinion out weighs the unavoidable incidents that are going to happen, with a business running on the Internet. No matter what a company has for an SLA, financially or service credit based, we all can agree things are going to happen. Moreover, if a company truly has to have 100% business continuity, then they need at least one or more secondary options to keep business running.

Google apps are not as Google as they claim.

I'm still using google app for my works. I'm not quite sure if there is a big fault in it. for now I admire, sometimes it's still unstable, may be it's caused of using ajax. Can you highlight all the major issues?

I do not understand why Microsoft focus so much on Google? Is there no other company out there? E.g. the new Outlook 2010 feature list. Sounds like a Gmail copy cat as a client app. It normally worked out for Microsoft to be a late follower and the get ride of competition by have more cash and/or a bigger sales + marketing force. I doubt this still works in the internet age, where the customer has choice and can not only buy from two companies = Microsoft or IBM(Lotus).

for brasil estar esperando mais noticia concretas

I think that you got  a position and it is really clear, you are working in favor of Microsoft, you are attacking Google. What's the reason?  Do you work for them? Do you get paid for them?. Your criticism doesn't look like a neutral or balanced review. I don't know so much about the theme but really you look partialised. You got a lot of bias against Google

@Giulian

Did you mention the same things when Google attack Microsoft?

They both doing the same thing, just that Google attack based on BS, Microsoft fight back based on facts. And why Microsoft that biased but Google? Why Microsoft that evil but Google?

Double standard??

I would like to understand how people can run their business on Google Apps. What is the meaning of such a statement?

Do you mean GMail? I spend a lot of time in my email with several emails opened, doing copy/paste all the time from different sources, attaching document or other emails. It is really complicated and time consuming to do so with a webmail.

Do you mean GDocs? How do you handle document round tripping losses? Offline? no VBA support...

To me Office brings autonomy to end-users, Google might be able to bring some of that too but not as a replacement to Office but more as a connected service bringing shared storage and simple email. I believe the best synergy is in between products and services that were designed to work together: Office & BPOS rather than Office & Google Apps or Google Apps on its own.