Microsofts Office365 Telco Strategy should make Google nervous

AT&T last week joined Verizon and a pantheon of major service providers in the  rush to offer MS Office365 email services.  good start.

Should Google be concerned? Well, I'm sure Eric Schmidt remembers only to well what happened when MS decided to kill Netscape.

Running the numbers from research undertaken by BackChannel in September 2012 Microsofts strategy of partnering with giant telco's is already biting into Google Apps for Business.

The graph shows the distribution of O365 installations by company size.

We looked at 22,000 UK companies with a recognised service hosted mail service and found MS 0365 had nearly 700 installs; so about 3%.  Checking the underlying data we see that many of the Office365 customers identified were BT SMB customers migrated off of BTs own legacy mail service, others classed as SMB had churned from Google, larger organisations from a mixture of established providers.

We can firmly predict that AT&T, Verizon, Orange,Vodafone and the dozen others partnering with Microsoft globally will have the same effect. 

In short Office365 delivered in collaboration with the Big Telco's is the start of a serious fight back by Microsoft against GoogleMail and Apps for Business and it is clearly off to a good start.

Should Google be concerned? Well, I'm sure Eric Schmidt remembers only to well what happened when MS decided to kill Netscape.

A trip down memory lane: From Mosaic to Chrome

Having been online since the late 80's Browsers have been like the soundtrack to my career from the early days of Gopher, Veronica & Archie to the arrival of Marc Andreessen's ground breaking Mosaic they've been a constant feature in my life. 
Here is a terrific little youtube documentary on the birth of the Netscape and the Web Browser and its untimely death after Microsoft decided it was time to take control of the market and launch Internet Explorer.

An interesting cameo and link between Netscape & Chrome is Eric Schmidt; who in 1998 as CEO of Novell integrated  Novonyx the Novell/Netscape joint venture into the main Novell business.  Schmidt shocked the industry in 2001 by jumping ship to join startup Google.  The rest is history, or is it?