Comparing Microsoft to Google
Okay, granted there are few hard facts here. But Susan said she had called at 4pm and had a reasonable response. We've been using Google Apps (premium and business) for two years now. I can attest to a world of difference between 2010 Google support for Apps customers and 2011 Google support for Apps customers. We have not required many calls to Google support over this time, but as off this year I have seen 24/7 support. I've called at 11pm and got someone in less than 5 minutes who was capable of understanding my problem and even giving me instructions on how to resolve it. Within the last month I have seen Googler Vic Gundotra respond in Google+ to an individual user who posted a complaint about a Google service and gave him the name and contact information of someone at Google who would handle it for him.
Now on to reliability. After starting Google Apps, we were trying Office
365 when that came out, because we still use Microsoft Office products a lot, but wanted the ease of collaboration that a cloud service should provide. Since we started with Google Apps, our downtime can be measured in MINUTES. 145 minutes to be exact. Compare that to the multiple massive failures of Office 365. I still like many Microsoft products, we use Windows on all our workstations, Server 2008 R2 on our servers, and many of us use Microsoft Office Suite because for some uses it cannot be equaled. But I'm not going to use an inferior product just because I like the brand.
