Washington DC is the latest organisation to decide Microsoft Office isn't worth the cash, moving to Google's suite of cloud products. Google Apps is software-as-a-service for business email, information sharing and security.Instead of Word, Excel and Outlook, 38,000 employees in the district will now be using Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Video for business and Google sites for intranets and the like.
The deal is estimated to be worth around $500,000 (£292,000), and consolidates an impressive uptake for Google Apps, launched just over two years ago.
Google claims around 500,000 organisations currently use its Apps products in one form or another, with 3,000 being added each day.
However, Microsoft is still turning in decent user numbers for its Office Live Workspaces applications, but these require the Office suite to be of real use, thus negating the real benefit of cloud working.
