Microsoft Gave Customer $250,000 To Choose Office 365 Over Google Apps

I just finished up at UNL (the school mentioned in article) and was really disappointed in the choice to use Office 365 over Google Apps. It was supposed to be a transparent process, but they made the decision behind closed doors and now I see why. Money talks.

as much as i hate Microsoft .. it is smart thinking. Get them while they are young.

I'm a student here, and I'm not surprised. Their University network went from being very fast and restriction-free, to be a SafeConnect riddled disaster. In personally troubleshooting issues with game consoles, I discovered how it worked and various methods of avoiding identifying myself on the network and avoiding bandwidth limits.

I passed this information on to deaf ears. (Hell, I even chatted with a SafeConnect employee on reddit that assured me it was resolved. Everyone gets random disconnects every 5-10 minutes and tiny outages once an hour. Game consoles will stop working for days at a time without my work around).

Anyway, they also went with Microsoft for the email over Google. I'm biased, but whatever. But, I am not surprised at this decision. The business people made the decisions instead of the tech department. And to be honest, is it that bad. UNL could use the money and Office 365 really isn't bad. I hate running Windows 7 just for Office. And let's face it, Google Docs sucks.

I worked on a project recently where they gave $10 million USD to convince a major consumer electronics manufacturer to use a Microsoft software component in an upcoming product. This is apparently standard practice for them.

Microsoft is essentially a marketing business with a huge amount of capital: not a software company.