Some tech pundits insist on referring to Microsoft's Office 365, as Microsoft's business-centric "answer" to Google's online services. Yes, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the cloud services space with Office 365. However, to suggest that Office 365 is an answer to Google Apps is to imply that Google's services are somehow in a league with Office 365. Office 365 is far more than simply a Web version of Office 2010. Office 365 is a service comprised of cloud-based versions of Microsoft's four front-running business products. Of course, that does include Microsoft Office. But it also bundles in Exchange (the widely-used email platform), Sharepoint (a platform for document sharing and collaboration) and Lync (a service that provides IM, video conferencing, PC phone calling and some enterprise social networking) all delivered through an interface that will make IT admins happy, thanks to the granular level of control that can be imposed on a business, regardless of size.

With a 99.9% uptime guarantee, reasonable pricing, and the power of Exchange, Lync, SharePoint and Office 2010, Office 365 is a promising solution for Windows-based businesses. End-users have access to Office 2010 document editing via the cloud or through the included, locally installed, Office 2010 Professional Plus client, at a very affordable cost per user per month. This is also the way to go if you're worried about your ability to function should your Internet connection go down. This is a cloud service, after all—without Internet access, it doesn't function, otherwise. Small to mid-size businesses can save money by going completely online with only Office Web Apps and opt to not use the local office 2010 client. Either way, end-users also have access to a rich web-based Outlook client that retains many of the feature of the desktop Outlook. Access to SharePoint sites for collaboration and Lync also provide users with a true, converged communications and collaboration experience.

Google Apps, while useful in a stripped-down way, simply can't deliver the very granular administration that Office 365 provides. Most businesses still have Windows environments and, unless they have very light productivity and collaboration needs, or operate mostly online, it makes far more sense (in terms of migration path and integration) for them to move to a hosted Microsoft platform than to Google Apps. Google's applications are also not nearly as feature-packed—it was only recently that Google Docs got the pagination capability!