Microsoft, Google in Battle to Win Over Students

"With the recession taking a bite out of university endowments and public school budgets alike, the competition between Google and Microsoft to convert the nation's colleges, universities and schools to the companies' free e-mail and other IT services that run on the Internet 'cloud' — outsourcing that can save a large university hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — has only grown more fierce. With the two companies fighting to baptize a future generation of computer users with their products, the stakes for both are significant."