As the American government continues its internal adoption of cloud computing services, Google and Microsoft have been scrambling for contracts – what with their being lucrative and influential and such. Sucks to be Google, then, because the FAA just awarded $91 million to Microsoft to have their platform transition to the Microsoft Office 360 cloud service.

The FAA – the Federal Aviation Administration – contract is more of a symbolic win for Microsoft than anything else. The governmental IT budget stands at around $78.5 billion — which is what Google and Microsoft are really fighting for. That, and I guess platform ubiquity – whichever service the government uses tends to be attractive to regular folk.

I mean, yes, $91 million isn’t nothing, and the 80 000 government employees that will be migrating to Office 360 is kind of a big deal, but it’s more the matter of beating out Google for a big government contract than the contract itself.

And they could do with a big symbolic win – what with Google winning a contract with the Department of The Interior last month. Although, obviously, this is just another back-and-forth between two groups eying an emerging and lucrative market that stands to fundamentally change the way we handle data.

So, you know. It’s worth keeping an eye on.

[Source: TC]