The tech giants have already engaged in a public war of words this year as they vied to sign up businesses, government agencies and universities for their competing versions of cloud-based productivity software.
Now Microsoft has cut its prices to small and mid-sized businesses for its Office 365 software, and Google is putting out the word for the first time that the rate of small companies signing up for cloud-based services like Gmail and Documents has doubled in the past six months.
That suggests the competition to sell cloud-based apps to small and medium-sized (or "SMB") businesses is only growing more intense, said Matt Cain, an analyst with Gartner