Businesses have eagerly embraced moving to the cloud to increase productivity, but some are learning that “productivity” is a relative term with certain products. Last week, the Microsoft Office 365 team started shedding more light on some the shortcomings of Google Apps compared to Office Web Apps.
These shortcomings aren’t trivial – they’re major features such as grammar check, support for columns, and mail merge. Add to that the unpredictable experience you or your intended user gets when converting Office files to Google Docs and productivity starts to go down the drain.
In the video above, the Office team takes on Google with an entertaining 3-on-3 basketball game that represents teamwork with Office Web Apps versus teamwork with Google Docs.
A growing number of businesses are choosing Office 365 so employees don’t have to find ways to overcome the feature gaps of Google Apps, which essentially reduce productivity.
"We quickly realized Google would not meet our needs, so asking our employees to put up with less functionality was not an option for us," said Sean Maisey, director of Operations for Colonial Williamsburg, in this Microsoft case study.
Business are also pointing to the limited offline experience of Google Apps, which doesn’t allow offline editing of spreadsheets and discourages offline work on a shared document.
In another case study, Big Red Book Finance Director Paraic Nolan said, "Google Docs is not really suitable for business use due to limited functionality and the lack of offline capabilities."
“Microsoft Office was built to live in both the online and offline worlds, with features like document merge, track changes, and conflicting change controls in SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro when working on shared documents,” said Microsoft’s Jake Zborowski in his post on the Office 365 Blog.
Zborowski adds, “Office is not standing still. We will continue to innovate and provide the tools to help people work better together.” Get the rest of this story in his post on the Office 365 blog.