Tuesday, September 07, 2010

How many evil empires can you support?

I’ve decide that I can only prop up 2 evil empires in my life so I’ve decided on Microsoft and Google. All of our PC’s run Windows 7 and either Office 2007 or 2010. I haven’t had time to upgrade all of them to 2010 yet. All of our phones are Android phones.

Microsoft gets: The desktop and the office suite hands down. With Office Live this is a total no brainer. Bing also wins for search on the PC. I’m hooked on the daily pictures. I support Dynamics GP and Google doesn’t compete in ERP so that’s a hands down win. Email with Outlook and note taking with One Note are also locks. Exchange gets my corporate mail.

Google gets: The phone ‘cause Windows Phone 7 isn’t out yet and is copying Apple too much. They also get the blog with Blogger because I have no interest in hosting a WordPress blog and Blogger is much more customizable than any of Microsoft’s blogging options. Google also get’s website analytics. Microsoft is simply non-existent here. Google also gets the nod for RSS reading. Microsoft’s RSS strategy just doesn’t support reading in multiple locations well. Gmail gets my personal mail, mainly for storage size and IMAP compatibility making it easy to use with Outlook.

Apple gets: Nada. I don’t even have Quicktime on my Windows machines. Here’s the thing, I don’t need to carry another device for music, Android runs just fine. I don’t think Apple does a good job of writing Windows software. iTunes is a pig and Steve Jobs is really needy. He keeps needing me to do things his way and that turns me off.

So, my limit is 2. The funny thing is, I don’t see the MS/Google ratio changing much in the near future. Other than search, the other items are really a slam dunk for me. If anything MS could create a great analytics package or web based RSS reader easier than Google will pry Excel or One Note from hands.

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