Microsoft is countering Google Apps with its own cloud based office productivity suite called Office Web Apps.  Why should you, as a business or personal user of office productivity software, care? Because the cloud makes things easier, safer, and a lot cheaper.

Businesses will no doubt weigh the options based on cost versus value. So let’s start with cost. Even with Microsoft’s recent price drop from $15 to $10 per month per user, they’re still priced 240% higher than Google. This means they have a lot to make up for in the value department to put them on par with their competitor.

And how about value? I haven’t compared Office Web Apps with Google Apps myself, but my friend Larry Higgins, Director, Sales & Marketing at One Touch Global,  just forwarded me this review:

I began using Google Apps for my personal needs in 2006. Until two months ago, I continued to use MS Office Professional as a backup – effectively paying twice but not being ready to cut the safety cord with Microsoft. I recently dropped MS Office and now use Google Apps exclusively for both the process improvements of the cloud computing model as well as the cost savings.

What made me put both feet solidly in the Google App camp?  Over the past year I’ve noticed that there is nothing that I or my users do that we can’t do in Google Apps. When colleagues send MS Word or Excel docs, we open them in Google Apps with no problem. For example:

When the chairman of my high school reunion recently sent six committee members a spreadsheet and asked each of us to update it with any current contact info we had on classmates, I immediately imported it as a Google Spreadsheet Doc. I then sent invites from within the doc to all committee members enabling us to all update the same document without  emailing attachments back and forth or manually coordinating and updating a master copy. It also tracked who made what changes. And although most committee members had never used a Google Spreadsheet before, the learning curve was trivial.

After viewing the video above, I’m glad I stopped waiting around for Microsoft to move to the cloud. They should have been there in 2002 anyway, but I suspect they had MS Office license fees to protect. As business consumers, we have those license fees to consider too – along with the cost of maintaining and updating the underlying products. With cloud computing, the inflated costs and headaches of hosting our own applications go away. And since Google is way out front of Microsoft in the cloud, now’s the right time for business people to seriously consider Google Apps.