Los Angeles City Council has approved a $7.2 million deal to use Google’s applications for its 30,000 personnel. The council voted unanimously to replace several of their current IT systems with Google Apps and GMail instead of competing offers over a dozen other IT suppliers.

The deal is a massive boost for Google as it attempts to compete with Microsoft, IBM and HP in the business arena. Perhaps it’s the first sign that cloud computing is being considered as a serious proposition by major corporations.

Google’s ambition is to lure companies way from their dependency on Microsoft Office. Their success to date has been modest:

• MS Office is one of the most entrenched business applications. For many companies, it is the primary reason for purchasing a PC.


• Feature-for-feature, MS Office beats Google Docs by a wide margin. Critics argue that Office users only utilize 10% those features, but that 10% differs from person to person.


• Many users develop their IT skills on MS Office. Google Docs may be simpler, but an element of re-training is likely to be necessary. For ex