When the Google Apps and Microsoft 365 development teams looked out of their office windows to decide what type of cloud they wished to install their Cloud Computing service in, they obviously had very different views of the sky.
Admittedly Google did look out of their window a number of years before Microsoft so clouds may have been a bit bigger then or maybe the cloud picked by Microsoft had just decided to diet so they could not quite get as much into theirs. Clouds are tricky things, ask any meteorologist.
What is the difference?
Certainly both companies’ views differ in approach to the other with Google opting for the standalone cloud and Microsoft opting for the slimmer version that involves the service user needing to keep some of the software and applications outside the cloud on their own computers.
One of the differences between the two methods chosen is that the company paying for a Google Apps cloud has to retain minimal IT support to carry out basic home server issues where a business using a Microsoft 365 needs IT support to manage the basics plus the installation and updating of the software outside of the cloud. You may be able to use familiar software, such as MSWord or MSOutlook, but you will still pay for them as somewhere along the line; maybe that is why the Microsoft cloud is more expensive to purchase.
You may have thought Google had developed their cloud service after Microsoft, as it seems more up to date and looks like it has improved on some existing weaknesses; but no Google actually started their development 2 or 3 years before Microsoft. Although Microsoft had the opportunity to learn from mistakes made by other service providers or taking advantage of examining existing clouds they still chose to go with a service that seems slightly dated.
Microsoft joins the cloud
Microsoft threw their cloud in the ring in 2008 with Google throwing theirs in 2006. The original idea of cloud computing came from service providers realising businesses, particularly small to medium ones, were changing their method of operation. A company with 10 employees may have a computer for every member of staff because somewhere along the line the individual member needed to access the companies IT system in some way. Companies had to purchase multiple licences for their software packages, some of these packages incorporated several different programmes. An example of this is Microsoft Office which consists of several different programmes all very useful, if you need them, but costing the same for every member of staff whether they used a spreadsheet, word processor or database or not; and this does not include the cost of updates etcetera.
Was it down to the investment in software?
Could the reason they chose their own way of cloud computing because they had some very notable software products which cost a fair sum of money to develop and they could see the revenue stream being eroded away? Possibly it could have been because these products were to well developed and integration between them and the cloud was proving a major difficulty. Maybe it was a combination of both; we will probably never know the truth of the matter as the information released was subject to widespread spin making it impossible to judge what is true and what is not.
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