Google, Microsoft square off on campus

At the recent Campus Technology 08 conference in Boston, both Google and Microsoft made a strong pitch for the education market. Both vendors offer free hosted e-mail and collaboration tools for K-12 and college students and faculty. Schools can use the tools while still preserving their familiar .edu domain names. Microsoft underscored its upcoming LiveMesh technologies as part of its new Live@edu suite, while Google emphasized its Google Apps technologies, including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets.

Both vendors hope to hook student users early with free services, and then parlay that usage into paying corporate accounts as those students graduate into the corporate workforce. To learn more about both programs, see Network World's write-up. To get additional insight into the vendors' strategies, watch the video from the show.