• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 1, 2010

Google's latest jab at Microsoft, in an effort to take market share, points squarely at software applications and operating system -- but could the company be biting off more than it can chew?

Emphasizing its focus on technology, the Mountain View, Calif. search engine not only dumped internal use of Microsoft's Windows operating system in favor of Chrome OS, but Google unveiled a calculator that pushes benefits, productivity gains, and cost saving for a company using enterprise apps in the cloud.

Microsoft has tried to move enterprise software applications to the cloud for years, but the company built its reputation on having clients download the apps to the PC rather than access them from the cloud, which makes the change slow and difficult in the minds of some decision-makers who license software.

Google's calculator not only spits out cost-saving results, but can create a custom URL, presentation, spreadsheet or poster with the calculated numbers to share with others who might have a say in the decision to "Go Google."

But the effort to demonstrate efficiencies might present problems for Google instead. Clicking on the link to view the sample poster for the example from Smart Furniture returns an error message: "You've reached the bandwidth limit for viewing or downloading files that aren't in Google Docs formats."

However, the Google cloud calculator itself seems to work well enough. The tool lets you enter your company's name and employee count. From that information it estimates how much a company can save annually. For example, a company with 50 people can save $30,953 annually. That's less than the company will spend on morning coffee, according to Google's promo, which also suggests that Google Apps only cost $50 per user per year and will make company employees 2.8 times more productive while mobile.

Companies that are turning toward the clouds for computing could eliminate about 1,390 hours of deleting spam messages annually, as well as adding 1,225 GBs of email storage. That's enough for 3,072,980 emails organized into conversation threads, reducing the number of inbox lines by 47%.

The calculator estimates that if 10 team members working on a project each make five revisions, that would amount to 50 versions of the same document. It also suggests that cloud computing could save 50 hours per year with automatic updates, and could help employees communicate 36% more effectively with integrated IM, voice and video chat services.

Overall, the company of 50 employees could spend $141,738 less recovering from data loss or theft of laptops, saving $7,500 in data recovery services.

In the browser wars, Google Chrome continues to capture market share, albeit small. It gained the most in May, up .32% to 7.05%, and both Internet Explorer and Firefox declined, according to the latest Net Applications report of Web browser market share.