Google Upsetting Microsoft’s Cloud-Office System Ambitions

Key Findings

• Google is cutting into Microsoft’s business for both email and personal productivity suites (the latter, by slow attrition rather than direct replacement). Compared with Microsoft, Google appears to be winning one-third to one-half of new, paid-for, cloud-based office system seats.
• Microsoft is dominant on-premises, but its marketing-driven strategy — basing new offers on cloud-based instances of its enterprise on-premises systems — may have lulled too many existing Microsoft customers into doing nothing with Office 365.
• Google’s call to action is appealing to organizations generally not pleased with their current situation. It drives deep and thoughtful re-examination of what to invest in and why.
• Primarily, the disaffected are moving to Google Apps, legitimizing that choice, and helping Google grow its base and defy all the early predictions of Google’s defeat.