Google has just announced that it will offer an online-based office suite to large businesses. The suite, in direct competition with Microsoft Office (during the current Vista push) will offer email, calendar management, spreadsheets and word processing tools for a competitive $50 per year per user — far below the current cost of maintaining the latest version of office.The current free version of Google Apps will be upgraded for the business users and will include full technical support, the promise of 99.9% uptime and larger email boxes (10 gigs!).
The timing of this roll out has been called “brutal” toward Microsoft, while the big boy MS is in the midst of convincing current clients to upgrade to Office 2007 (which carries a pricetag that begins at 239 for an upgrade/$399 for a full version of the standard and soars to $539 upgrade/$679 for office, according to the Microsoft site).
Before you decide to switch to Vista, you may want to read a few reviews of the largest media rollout of a new operating system in history.
Last Friday, OneNote 2007 was released to manufacturing (along with the rest of the Office suite). They have blessed it as a finished product.