Twenty-five years ago, Apple Computer established a home in the K-12 educational market and introduced an entire generation to the Apple brand. Today you'll find both PCs and Macs in schools at every level, but there's a new battle going on to offer a wide variety of technology services to students. This time the two major competitors are Google and Microsoft.At the college level, schools want to offer students institutionally branded email, instant messaging, and cloud storage. They want students to be able to access these services wherever they happen to be: school-owned computing clusters, personal notebooks, or mobile devices. Fortunately for college IT departments, these are the same services that companies like Google and Microsoft are offering to the public. Like Apple before them, both companies are no doubt hoping that success in the educational market will create familiarity and brand recognition that affects a student's future preferences.

Google has been putting together their University Roadshow to tell school IT departments about their college-oriented services. Microsoft is doing the same for their Live@edu program. As you might expect, each offering plays to the existing strengths of the current public offerings; there's a lot more evolution than revolution here.

Both services offer the basics of calendars, instant messaging, and email available through a web, IMAP or POP interface. My simple contrast of the two is that Microsoft's service appeals to the IT department, emphasizing its ability to work with Exchange and Microsoft Office applications. Google offers updates that emphasize social networking and scriptability of their online applications, which is most likely to appeal to end users.

Looking at where both companies are with their current market share for online services, it would seem that Google has a pretty big head start in courting the college market. College students are more likely to be impressed by social networking than by Office integration. Still, I wouldn't count Microsoft out here, especially since it plays to their ability to find and court the handful of university IT staff who ultimately make the decision.