Battle of the Giants

I recently moved to a bigger city, and of course the first thing that I setup was my internet connection.  I’ve had the same ISP for a couple of years now, and they’ve been alright.  I’ve noticed drops in service here and there but overall it was a tolerable experience.  However, as soon as I started watching my online shows in the new place, I noticed some dramatic changes in my viewing experience.  There were long periods of waiting for the shows to buffer, and I felt like I was relapsing to my younger days of dial-up.  I got so frustrated one night I even tweeted about it:

Just took me two hours to watch a 1 hour movie. Why I’m leaving @coxcomm. — Krono$ (@SuperKronos) January 28, 2013

I finally decided to switch over and give DSL a shot, but I didn’t cancel my Cable.  I figured I’d do a little testing and really see who was the better service after all.  I put together a pretty extensive document of my results.  You can find that document and all the data I captured and used in a link below. This blog post is a summary of what I found to be the important parts.

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In this edition of the Battle of the Giants, we look at both Google’s and Microsoft’s online document editing programs.

History:

Microsoft has been in the market of document editing software from the inception of Windows 1.0 with Windows Write.  Now Office 2010 has been selling for some time now, and while you might prefer other solutions like OpenOffice or the newer LibreOffice, Microsoft Office has a major foot hold in the Word Processing market.

With the release of Live services in 2005, Microsoft started to offer for free, online versions of their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint programs.  Microsoft’s online services have now gone through 4 major updates/releases and currently offers Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and  OneNotebook.

Google moved into the online documents world with the acquisition of Writely, a Word alternative, in 2006.  Later support for spreadsheets, and presentations were added.  Currently Google offers Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Form, and Drawings.

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Introduction and Brief History:

Cloud computing is the concept of moving everything you do on a personal computer to the online world. The most basic and oldest function has been email. Google revolutionized this with their offering of Gmail back in 2004 which offered 1GB of online email storage. Compared with Yahoo’s 4 MB this was a big deal (no pun intended).

Google continued their revolutionary push to offering other online services for free. Docs, Calendar, Maps, and many others have now followed. Today Gmail offers over 7.5 GB of storage space and has come out with its innovative “priority inbox”.

Hotmail has been around for a long time. Its creation in 1996 makes it one of the oldest running email clients out there. Microsoft bought out Hotmail in 1997 for $400 million, and quickly grew. It was reported that by 1999 nearly 30 million users had a Hotmail account. Currently Hotmail only limits your email inbox to a mere 500GB!

The Comparison:

For this comparison there are three things that I’m going to focus on:

1. User Interface
2. Storage Space
3. Accessibility
4. Features

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