Microsoft counters Google’s sales pitch to Office users
Thursday, May 13, 2010 11:16Microsoft has gone on the counterattack against Google, saying that its rival’s online applications don’t cut it as supplements to Microsoft Office.
In a lengthy blog post, Alex Payne, director of Microsoft’s online product management team, took on a recent Google sales pitch, which urged Office users to put off upgrading to the new Office 2010, and instead add Google Docs as an online complement to older editions.
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Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s enterprise product management director, made a direct appeal to the millions of corporate workers who rely on Microsoft’s Office. “If you’re considering upgrading Office with Office, we’d encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs,” said Glotzbach. “You probably already own Office 2003 or 2007 (or maybe Office 2000), and there’s no need to uninstall them. Fortunately, Google Docs also makes Office 2003 and 2007 better.”
Microsoft had a problem with that pitch.
“They are claiming that an organization can use both [Office and Google Docs] seamlessly,” said Payne. “This just isn’t the case.”
Payne claimed that file conversions between Office documents and Google Docs were far from flawless. “Charts, styles, watermarks, fonts, tracked changes, SmartArt, etc. (can be a pretty long list) might be gone or manipulated in a way resulting in something that doesn’t look like it did before conversion,” Payne said.
Moving between Office’s document formats and Google Docs’ formats means that users will lose components and formatting, Payne continued. “When that file was originally converted from Office to Google Docs, you lost those components,” he said. “They aren’t coming back just because you are in Office again.”
Payne said Microsoft’s cloud-based versions of Office programs — dubbed Office Web Apps — provide “higher fidelity” that insures elements that don’t appear online aren’t lost when they return to the desktop. “We call this ’round-tripping’ and we think it’s important,” Payne said. “Google Docs simply doesn’t do this when you use it with Office.”
Google’s original pitch, as well as Microsoft’s rebuttal, were coordinated with the official launch of Office 2010 .
