Just yesterday, Google made a shockingly (for them anyway) aggressive marketing move. Basically Google has cooked up a crafty way to entice big companies to give up their big EA (enterprise agreements) contracts with Microsoft in favor of Google's office products. For the sake of clarification, a Microsoft EA is a three-year contract, in which Microsoft gives you deep discounts on Office and other enterprise apps, but it does lock your company into their products for that period of time.
Basically, Google plans to let Microsoft EA customers use Google's Apps for Work for free while they are waiting for their EAs to finish. This will give users and IT managers time to get familiar with the new Google work environment at no extra cost. This is a huge push and should prove very enticing to those IT departments which haven't tried out Google's office related products.
That's not all that Google is offering to entice Microsoft customers. Google realizes that companies need to use trusted resellers in conjunction with their EAs to help them buy and deploy their business software. So, Google has offered to pay a "bounty" of $25 per user to these resellers, out of pocket. This is to help offset the costs of training new Google Apps users.
There is one "catch" regarding this deal (of course you knew there had to be one). Companies that qualify and agree to try out the Google program, must promise that once the EA has concluded, they will use Google Apps for Work for a full year at its standard price. That price amounts to $5 per user per month for just the productivity tools, or $10 per user per month for unlimited storage.
It seems like Google really wants to snag as many of Microsoft's Office customers as possible with this new marketing strategy. Sound off and let us know if you think this will work for Google. For more info, here's the Google blog post: Official Google for Work Blog: Going Google just got easier
