Neowin: A month with only Microsoft cloud services, part one

Neowin

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Microsoft claims to be "All In" the cloud, but are they really? Are their services good enough to convert to entirely, without relying on another company for an essential task, such as search? The Redmond software giant is convinced that their products are as good as or better than their competitors at the moment, so I'm going to put them to the test.

Over the next month, I'm going to take the plunge and stop using Google products. That's right, I've decided to go 100% Microsoft. I didn't even think it would be possible, but with the release of so many good products over the last few months, I decided it would be a good time to give it a try. In the course of the next few weeks, this series will look at "living the Microsoft life" -- using Office 365 for documents, Hosted Exchange for email (part of Office 365), Bing for search and Windows Phone 7 for mobile.

Industry News,Microsoft,review,office,cloud,beta,office 365

In the spirit of full disclosure, before today I used Gmail exclusively for email, Google exclusively for search and Windows Phone 7 for mobile. I'm quite attached to the products, and consider myself brand loyal, so this will be an interesting ride. Let's take a quick look at the products as they are today, and how easy it was to switch to them.

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- This article is brought to you in partnership with Neowin.

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Interesting experiment; Steven please do update us with regard to his observations once his experiment ends. By the way I am not experimenting but I haven't used Gmail / Google in ages, instead I've been using Hotmail/Yahoo Mail (for about 90% of my time/mails) + Bing, and it is pretty hard to differentiate between them. In fact, I'll give MS a huge plus for WLM App. Beside, I just noticed Owen agrees with one observation which I already have i.e. WP7 have the best/minimalist interfrace (and being an Android user i.e. GT-i9000 set, I will add it feels like iOS's cheap copy / slow / crash prone) :eek:
 
Bing and Google come pretty close for quick searches, and I don't care that much about advanced functionality on Google Docs or cloud-based Office as long as those serve the purpose of letting me share a file with a group. However on the email front, I find Gmail to be way superior to Hotmail. In fact, I'd say Hotmail even at this stage is an insult of what hassle-free webmail should be.
 
Too lazy to find my password here, but I have to say, I can't find anything different between the search engines, the big thing that I noticed is Bing Translator and Google Translate don't really compare, Bing is far superior. As far as Gmail being a "hassle-free" webmail, I disagree. They require users to have a phone number handy to activate an account, not hassle-free at all. Just wish Hotmail natively integrated chat other than Live...come on down AIM...
 
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