One of the big Microsoft-Google battles taking place right now is the war for cloud productivity services. From web-based email to document creation, both companies are actively fighting for big clients – including both corporations and government contracts. While Microsoft has its upcoming Office 365 suite to bring into the line of fire, that service is still in beta testing and it’s currentlyBPOS (Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite) vs Google Apps. BPOS repeatedly held its server reliability as a major point in its favor, but that particular strength will have to be dropped from the list: BPOS crashed hard for a three day stretch last week.
As time has passed, we’ve been able to see the responses from Microsoft, Google, and industry analysts, giving us a much more clear idea of both the causes and reactions to the issue. In summary, the issue was first caused on May 10th by malformed email that created a backlog on email delivery of up to nine hours. Then, on May 12th, separate issues with the DNS and other, undisclosed elements of BPOS caused delays to logging in and sending mail (with delays of up to three hours). This also impacted devices using Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.
Microsoft was good enough to offer a real apology, taking full responsibility for the issue and acknowledging the severity of it. This apology may have been especially painful for Microsoft because it meant eating their criticisms of Google’s cloud services. Meanwhile, while Google hasn’t made an official statement, there’s word that those in the Google Apps department are satisfied “that others are now appreciating how difficult it can be to run cloud services at scale.”
Without a doubt, this major crash – which saw major effects on the 10th through 12th of this month – changes the playing field between Google and Microsoft. However, it also gives us a reminder that cloud services have their shortcomings, and no one is yet at the point of absolute reliability.
[via Google Watch and MSOnline Service Team Blog]
