User Interface – it matters

Last month I wrote about the costs of outsourcing email versus hosting it in-house, and followed on to have a look at how Google offer very low-cost solutions for a basic web presence.

Microsoft are fighting back with their Office Live Small Business offering. They will let you host a website for you, provide you with hosted email and even give you a free domain (for the first year, or two years if it’s a .co.uk) if you sign up…for the low-low cost of €0 – for 1 year.

There is some small print, among which is the gem that you’ll be looking at ads in your email unless you want to pay to remove them – much like Google Apps, the collaboration tools don’t scale as cheaply as Google’s do and the webspace provided free is utterly hopeless compared to the big G’s offering, but this is still a respectably low-priced software-as-a-service product.

It’ll be interesting to see what sort of uptake they get.