Friday, March 27, 2009

The Cloud Market: Google Vs. Microsoft

Originally Posted to ZDNet

Both Queensland University for Technology (QUT) and Ohio State University (OSU) have now signed up to Live@edu, Microsoft’s online cloud suite designed for students, including Hotmail, SkyDrive and Workspaces.

Over 100,000 students from these two universities are now using Live@edu, after extensive testing resulted in Microsoft getting the deal and Google being pushed our of the picture.


Corrections:
15GB space with Windows Live Workspaces, not 5GB
Mobile device support is given through Hotmail/Outlook Live

3 million over 6 million students (thanks Microsoft PR) worldwide use Live@edu whereas Google Apps’ user figure isn’t available, Microsoft nevertheless seems to be catching up. Twenty other universities are in talks with Microsoft to offer their services to students, which as free services go aren’t bad, especially in this current economic downturn.

Many universities offer a mediocre storage limit for email, as most students don’t appear to get many messages. On the other hand, some do - like me - where I use my University of Kent email address as a main account. The majority of students have to choose which messages to keep and which to delete when it they use email to transfer work from campus to home and vice-versa.

To be fair, either service is as good as one another in my professional opinion, although Google’s cloud office feature which works far better than Microsoft’s Live Workspaces, which has yet to catch up on.