are much more similarities than distinctions in Microsoft’s and Google’s approaches to building out their partner ecosystems for their respective hosted productivity suites. Apps and Office Live are not head-to-head competitors. Google Apps includes hosted mail,
Windows 7 Home Basic 64bit, calendar,
Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Plus Activation Key, document and spreadsheets. Office Live includes hosted mail,
Office Home And Business 2010 Activation, small-business accounting, workspace and (with two of the versions) business-contact management. (Office Live isn’t a hosted version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) spite of these distinctions, Google and Microsoft both realize that there’s money to be made in convincing software vendors,
Office Standard 2007 Serial Key, systems integrators, consultants and other partners to build on top of their respective offerings. The adversaries also both realize the business potential of getting others to sell hosted versions of their wares. May 18, Google quietly unveiled its “Google Apps Partner Edition” offering that it’s targeting at “ISPs,
Genuine Windows 7, portals and other service providers.” you have to do is point and click in the easy admin control panel and figure out what branding you’d like to layer on top of the products in order to create a customized look and feel. You can quit spending your resources and time on applications like webmail — and leave the work to our busy bees at the Googleplex,” according to Product Manager Hunter Middleton, in a posting to the official Google Blog. meanwhile, is slowly but surely working to build up a partner community around its Office Live set of hosted Office add-ons. At the recent Microsoft Mix ‘07 conference, Microsoft officials showed attendees how to customize the Office Live public site and applications, as well as how to build mash-ups using Office Live elements. is showcasing third-party-customized Office Live apps on the Office Live Marketplace. And it is centralizing resources for partners interested in building on top of Office Live on the “Office Live Innovate On” portal. biggest potential stumbling block here, in my opinion, is that it is expected to field its own hosted Exchange, hosted SoftGrid and hosted SharePoint offerings, thus competing with some of the very partners that it has been courting. partners gravitate toward Google or Microsoft in this customize-on-hosted-platforms space? Will it simply be a case of whoever has the best application programming interfaces (APIs) winning? ISVs and integrators: Are you alot more inclined to build on top of Google’s or Microsoft’s hosted solutions? (Or neither?)