Why Google Apps is better than IBM LotusLive

We at CloudGlow have experience with both Google Apps and IBM LotusLive as an office application platform. In our view, Google Apps is a fundamentally better product suite. Here are the reasons based on our experience:

• Google Apps has far superior runtime performance (in fact in our view, even most desktop applications appear sluggish compared to Google AJAX)
• Richer functionality and great collaboration tools
• Very well designed and thought through GData based API access
• Availability of a zero cost option for small guys (they even call it the standard edition!)
• This gives Google a huge advantage... its like the world is testing its software and scalability for free - Google is way smarter than you think when it offers something for free :)
• Integration with Single Sign On and external authentication schemes via SAML
• External mechanisms to populate Google Apps documents (e.g. filling in spreadsheets via Web Forms)
• Superior domain control capability and Admin panel
• Developer friendly community and online forums