“After that comment, we did some research,” said Amit Singh, vice president of enterprise cloud at Google. Google looked at 5,000 recent business customers of its Google Apps services. “Literally thousands are moving from Microsoft to Google,” he said.
Asked if Ballmer was just plain wrong when he said Microsoft beats out Google so often, Singh said: “I’ll let you make your own judgment.”
Ballmer made the comment at the Web 2.0 Summit last month. Singh spoke Wednesday at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood City, California.
While Google is a new entrant serving enterprises, most companies that start using Google Apps like Gmail are replacing Microsoft products. Google says 4 million businesses are using Google Apps.
Microsoft recently launched its Office 365 cloud communication and collaboration service in new countries and reported that it is growing eight times faster than its former hosted service, Business Productivity Online Suite.
Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy’s e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com