A few days ago I wrote a post comparing Office Web Apps to Google Docs. I received a some good criticism from an anonymous commentator that I feel merits its own post. In part of the post I compared the rendering of a sample Word document in both Office Web Apps and Google Docs. Here is the criticism:

Come on, Eugene. You cannot say “Office Web Apps are better” if you only compare one product: the word processor and only show us the rendering of two pages.

I’m not saying your conclusion is wrong for the Word comparison, but to say which product is better you will need to dig a bit deeper and compare Excel and PowerPoint as well. Also you only compared the layout of the rendered pages, yet you say “much better viewing and editing experience” whereas you only tell us about the viewing experience. Why don’t you compare all features e.g. In Google Docs you can indent text like so… and in Office Web Apps like so.

On the surface the criticism seems to have some merit. But as I have stated previously, I don’t believe that a feature-by-feature comparison is a valid way of comparing products like authoring software. The important thing to compare is the quality of the respective products’ outputs, which is what I did. I used the output from the Word app as a representative comparison, but you could do the same for Excel and PowerPoint as well. This article did a more exhaustive comparison and determined that if “Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are a regular part of your online life, Office Web Apps has it all over Google.” If I create a proposal or resume, the reader is not interested in what features my authoring software has, only in how the final output looks. Don’t take my word. The file used for the comparison is available here. Try it yourself.

Aside from the output quality, I wanted to call out the privacy concerns and the cloud service provider’s information handling policies. These criteria are often overlooked when organizations evaluate cloud services providers. Given recent headlines about Google’s privacy policies, it’s a very valid concern. Of course the best way to mitigate the concerns of the provider’s data policies is to have the option to keep your data on your network storage with in-house hosted software, something that only Microsoft offers.

But if you really want a feature-by-feature comparison, check out this post that concluded, “with the possible exception of cost, it seems that Microsoft has an edge in almost every category of comparison.”