My startup is very atypical for HN (Renewable energy, so we do multi-million dollar research projects, deploy equipment that costs from 2-100 million, and our seed round is looking like we are going to close at about 150 million dollars.)
Despite the vast difference in scale between what I do and what most startups on this board do, I'm still looking to run the IT side of the business the same - cloud-based, using the latest tools that this crowd and others deploy, running a lean shop, etc.
I am still deciding whether Google is the right answer, or box.net or Podio, or others... But we definitely will not be installing Microsoft's solutions.
Only if Google increases their level of support. I work at a large business and we spoke with both Google and Microsoft. Though I'm a Google fanboy, I'll admit that the level of support from Microsoft is currently much better than Google. Microsoft's cost of implementation was also lower.
Without very competitive high bandwidth costs, i just don't see how business software, much less, enterprise software, could ever really be worth the investment on the web.
Tried Zoho Creator (http://www.zoho.com/creator) and its reporting partner Zoho Reports (http://reports.zoho.com)?
Disclaimer: I work for Zoho
A present-day startup would have to be insane to spend cash on installed office software, when GApps and other cloud-based offerings offer features for free that cost $$$ and take serious configuration effort to get working with MS Office, such as collaboration/sharing (Sharepoint! Ugh!)
And once a company is using a browser-based office suite, I can't see them migrating to MS Office as they grow, except for some specialised tasks, such as large-scale financial modelling in Excel.
Word is massive overkill for intra-company documents, and I honestly prefer http://prezi.com to Powerpoint for presentations (though Keynote is still top of the heap IMHO).
I'd be interested in seeing a web-based equivalent of MS Access - super easy database creation and hosting. Anyone got any links?
It all spells trouble for MS in the medium term, I would say.