Windows 7 - Microsoft strikes back at Google on e-mail back-up plan

Microsoft strikes back at Google on e-mail back-up plan

It took a week, but Microsoft execs have come out swinging against Google’s plan for providing e-mail back-up for Exchange.

Google announced its $25 per user/per year Google Message Continuity service on December 9. When I asked Microsoft execs for their initial take on Google’s plan to back-up Exchange with Gmail, I got a fairly bland statement from a spokesperson. (”With their announcement, Google joins an existing list of email continuity providers for Exchange.”)

On December 16, however, Microsoft went on the offensive against Google with a couple of strongly-worded blog posts. One claimed that Google Message Continuity is cumbersome and costly. In the event there’s an Exchange outage, “Exchange will automatically failover if the customer has HA (high availability) setup for Exchange, which most customers do,” said Tom Rizzo, a Senior Director for Microsoft Online services.