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

IBM LotusLive - first experience

I recently tried out IBM LotusLive. I was very excited that IBM had an offering in the "cloud apps" arena, that my company - CloudGlow - specializes in. After logging in, I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised, but I actually found that LotusLive has very minimal functionality as of my testing. Given that Google has set a certain bar on functionality and performance, I was surprised that LotusLive is not even attempting to exceed the capabilities of Google Apps. The service itself seems to be all prepared for a small/medium business launch. With IBM behind it, of course, we can expect the service to get better over time. For now it seems like Google does not have to worry about it. May be it is just my view about Google Apps, but I just love it and feel that it is pure performance and great functionality (of course, it is not as extensive as Microsoft Office desktop version). It is really ready for prime time. Lets see where IBM takes their offering... the cloud apps world is looking forward to it.