[mzr]

"What’s more, Cain said, Google’s contract terms are much simpler than dealing with Microsoft. And since Google updates its software via the Internet, which Microsoft only recently started doing with some of its products, it means clients won’t be working for years on outdated applications."

This is just willfully ignorant. If you have Exchange, you probably have Active Directory. You can update Office various ways. I updated 1000 computers from Office 2003 to 2010 without touching any of them. I can also push an update to all our computers only downloading the patches once, not with 1000 computers downloading the same thing all at once.

I haven't seen Google Docs mass controls, but with AD and Office I was able to fix a PowerPoint video acceleration issue with a subset of our machines. Otherwise I'd have to change a setting for every person who logged into these particular machines. I realize that I may not have had this problem with Google Docs. However, we've found that we can't replicate what is done with PowerPoint in Google Docs.

[termie]

I'm sure many people were pissed with Office 2010 since the 'upgrade' from Office 2003 to 2010 was a full-price affair (see http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9143103/Microsoft_dum...). (EDIT: that was for retail, but you get the idea). So, while your 1000 machine deployment was technically straight-forward, it was probably ~ $100,000 for the software, plus your time (with patching!) financially. Lots of large companies and government find that cost not worth it given the benefit and they ultimately end up with outdated versions.