Microsoft Takes Potshots At Google And Says It Took Back 430 Enterprise Customers

Business Insider/Julie BortKevin TurnerMicrosoft COO Kevin Turner says that Office 365, the cloud version of Microsoft Office, is the fastest growing product in the history of the Microsoft, though he wasn't exactly clear what metric he was using for growth.

The product is on track to generate $1.5 billion worth of revenue on annual basis, he said, and in 2014, he expects it to "blow that way."

He also took the opportunity to trash talk Google and Google Apps, which is Microsoft's head-on competitor to Office 365. Google claims it has 5 million businesses using Google Apps, and last year Amit Singh, a Google VP and head of its Enterprise, said Google's goal was to grab 90% of Office customers away from Microsoft.

But Microsoft says it will win them back, one by one.

Turner proudly proclaimed that Redmond had already nabbed back 430 Google Apps customers.

"It turns out, security, privacy, data protections" are "very important to enterprises," he said. "It helps that we don't read people's emails and snoop on their WiFi and that sort of thing gives them comfort in our enterprise solution."

On the other hand, Microsoft has been forced, repeatedly, to apologize for outages of its consumer clouds. That sort of thing doesn't sit well with enterprises, either.