Next month, Microsoft will release Office 2010.
With the release of Office 2010 on May 12, Microsoft will complete an effort to move its long portfolio of applications to the Cloud, offering its business and government customers a new way to deliver services to users.
But while Microsoft dominate the office productivity suite on the desktop, its mindshare is clearly under siege because of Google Apps.
The city of Los Angeles, which may be Google's marquee government user, has been frank in disclosing details of its agreement. By the end of June, Los Angeles expects to complete a transition of some 30,000 employees to Google Apps.
Los Angeles has been frank about the contract, which includes unlimited damages for a data breach, the right to audit, guarantees that the data remain in the contiguous 48 states, and penalties if Google's services are unavailable for anytime longer than five minutes a month.
Microsoft are however confident entering into this space due to their experience in the enterprise, Microsoft have quoted"We know a lot more than potentially any vendor in the industry about the types of questions (business customers) have because we have been through the enterprise software discussion before," O'Brien said in an interview here.
O'Brien argues that Microsoft's 15-years of experience with cloud-based services, which began with its acquisition of Hotmail in 1998, gives it particular strength in this environment.
A major issue in cloud services is having the ability to avoid vendor lock-in by having application and data portability.