Max Hoberman helped make the Halo video game series a hit for Microsoft’s Xbox consoles, but when he founded his own business he decided to use the e-mail and calendar services offered by Microsoft’s rival Google.  

Hoberman’s new game development company, Certain Affinity, in Austion, Texas, doesn’t have any dedicated IT staff, so the practical benefits of using Google Apps were obvious -- it’s free and easy to set up, Hoberman notes.

“I’m a UI designer by trade, so I care a lot about the interface,” says Hoberman, who was the multiplayer and online lead designer for all three Halo video games. “I’m a huge fan of the interface for the Google applications. … But to be completely honest, the thing that really decided it for me is it’s free and we had it up and running quickly.”

There are a couple of holdouts among Hoberman’s 17 employees who still use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, but most of the staff has fully converted to Google Apps, he says.

Like Microsoft Office, Hoberman notes that Google does a good job providing a shared calendar program, and he thinks it does a better job with certain features like threaded e-mail conversations. “I used to try and set up Outlook to do threaded conversations,” Hoberman says. “It’s really hard to do it well in Outlook. Outlook does a silly thing -- it turns every e-mail into the start of the thread, and it just gets ugly and messy.”

Microsoft remains the dominant player in the office tools market. But Google and its suite of e-mail, instant messaging and VoIP tools is making some inroads, particularly with small customers such as Certain Affinity, which began using Apps about six months ago.

Google Apps Premier Edition, a juiced-up version of what Hoberman uses, costs $50 per user per year and has extra services such as e-mail migration, 24-hour phone support and 25GB e-mail storage.

That’s the version used by Core10 Architecture in St. Louis, a company with fewer than 10 employees that wanted collaboration tools and options for telecommuters without the burden of managing a heavy IT infrastructure.

“I’m not interested in hosting anything here, or managing any kind of access like that,” says Michael Byrd, who describes himself as a half owner, half IT manager. “It’s all we can do to just have our own network.”