Microsoft chops cloud costs

Microsoft is cutting the cost of its hosted cloud business productivity bundle.

This includes Exchange Online, which falls from $10 per user, per month, to $5. The business productivity bundle of Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online falls from $15 to $10.

In public the company is insisting this has nothing to do with competition from Google and other rivals.

But one its VPs was less bashful about bashing the competition. Chris Capossela told Computerworld that he doubted Google's claims for paying users. He said: "I have a really hard time understanding their [Google's] numbers. You simply don't know what their paying user numbers are. Analysts predict that they are pretty small. It's hard for us to really know."

Of course Microsoft didn't blame rival providers. Instead it claimed that it was enjoying economies of scale now that it has so many users. The firm claims to have over a million paying customers of its various online offerings and that excludes Live Meeting, Mary Jo Foley reports.

Most services require a minimum of five seats with services starting at $2 a month for occasional users.

Microsoft's pages are here. ®