Its about time msft start defending itself

With more of our employees switching to Macs, I'd love to know why we still experience errors when sending outgoing e-mail with Outlook 2011 via our BPOS exchange package with Microsoft. Shouldn't the client and server being working together like butter?  Same team.

I second the question about BPOS Exchange and Mac.  Our BPOS experience has been poor, and I'm on the verge of recommending that we move to Google Apps to get better support for our users iPhones and Mac Exchange clients.  The disruption and hours of our admin spent on the phone resolving these things is expensive.

Why then are you still developing Bing?

The article is very plausible in the way it points out why Google´s motivation to be doing enterprise software is not very strong. On the other hand, the cost & feature argument does not hold when looking at SMBs. For most businesses Google´s enterprise application suite is just fine, rock solid and needs little maintenance. E.g. in our company we moved to Google Apps and I never experienced one glitch, never missed a feature and never lost a document. Privacy? Yep, that might bea biggie one day but so far Google has never been evil so i give them the benefit of the doubt. What is Google doing in enterprise software? World domination :-) ? No...they charge 50 USD per user per year. Since almost everybody on this planet uses office apps, that seems like a valid argument to become nr1 in this business. 500 millions users use MS Office, that´s a 2.5 billion USD opportunity!

Considering Google has a couple thousand employees dedicated to Google Enterprise, and the rapid adoption and success of Google Apps, I am certain you are making a moot point.  Google Apps is here to stay, Tony.  You know it better than most since they are taking customers from you daily.  Companies are increasingly asking themselves "Why Microsoft?" but not in the way your blog would suggest.  The question is really, "Why [do I need] Microsoft [anymore]?"  And it is a valid question Google has answered well.

If you can't innovate then criticise your competitors

brooksreview.net/.../ballmer

Cheap shots on ad dollars and privacy, you're in the search business too.

Blah, blah, blah... More of the same blathering from Microsoft. Too little, too late.  Face it Microsoft: you're the new GE. Big, cash-rich, and utterly irrelevant.

It's amazing how many people here don't seem to understand that Microsoft's online offerings are as cheap as Google's yet do not involve ads.  Google is an advertising company, that is where its core revenue comes from...

@Justin,

Please show me the screen shot with ads in Google Docs?  You can't because they don't exist.  

Google's offering is far superior to the MS offering here.  Where's the tagging with multiple labels in MS? Where is the drag and drop to organize items?  Where's the drag and drop to upload files? Google Docs load faster and perform faster as well.  

The only place I see ads are in GMail, which are text based and load faster than the image/display ads that appear in HotMail...

So please, do tell, where are these ads you speak of? The only places I see ads is where Microsoft also has ads... Oh and I just noticed, they opted in my FaceBook account to show up in their search... great, who said they could do that???

*Yes I expect this comment to get censored like the last one I made... There's another place Google excels... Transparency, when Google messes up, they come out and say "We messed up", they also don't hide and delete critical comments...

I agree with James: this is Microsoft accusing Google of things they are guilty of themselves, to a much greater extent. Google's ads are far less intrusive than Microsoft's.

@tony tai - maybe the whole board needs to be replaced...  If Gates came back he would out Ballmer in a second but chooses to run his philanthropy instead and doesn't want to upset the status quo.  Did you read my link?  Do you realise that MSFT stock price is the same place it was 10 years ago?  I run a stockbroking firm and i am in the process of moving away from windows (to mac and ubuntu).  No i'm not a fan boy but a business and consumer user who is sick of the second rate and expensive products microsoft keeps pumping out.  O/S dominance no longer matters, most apps (at least most in my industry) are now web based.   Metro is promising but it's still got Windows underneath... IMO Microsoft needs to reinvent itself for the times instead of milking past success...

@Tony Tai

"Google’s Gmail offered to businesses not only involves ads, it scans business users’ email to serve targeted ads to business users. See this post for the details: http://bit.ly/jZi1MT"

This is inaccurate. There are not targeted ads in the paid Google Apps for Business. The radio button does not exist in settings as it does in consumer Gmail.