Microsoft Plots to Beat Google on Collaboration

There’s no love lost between Microsoft and Google. The two goliaths are locked in competition in a variety of fronts in the tech sector, spanning from the consumer Web to enterprise operations. One of the most contentious battlegrounds is in Web-based productivity apps, where Google is trying to unseat the dominant market position that Microsoft enjoys with its Office portfolio.

Both companies are fighting aggressively for public-sector contracts, with Google recently beating out Microsoft for a major email contract with the General Services Administration. But a Microsoft executive, while acknowledging that Google has emerged as a formidable opponent, believes that the company will prevail on the collaboration front. Google disagrees. Datamation reports on the rivalry.

The battle between Google and Microsoft over cloud services is heating up. Last week, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) won a coveted contract to provide Web services to the General Services Administration (GSA), beating out Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT) in the process, but Microsoft isn’t taking the news lying down.

“That contract is email only. They (the GSA) still use Office on the desktop and we can win on the collaboration side,” Thomas Rizzo, Microsoft’s senior director of online services, told InternetNews.com during a wide-ranging interview. “We’ve had lots of government wins, including the Department of Defense for Exchange, the Army, the Air Force and city governments,” he added. (A Google spokesman says the GSA will be using Google’s collaboration tools).

Read the full story at Datamation:


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