"As they plunged into a project on ancient Egypt this fall, Jay Martino's Cupertino Middle School students probably didn't realize they were on the front lines of a high-stakes battle between Google and Microsoft.
But the sixth-graders, who did the entire research project on a 'walled' network of student Web sites using document-sharing software and e-mail provided by Google for free, are among the thousands of students worldwide that Google and Microsoft are fighting over."
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.