I do know, from perusing the free-form comments, that there was quite a bit of anti-Google or anti-Microsoft sentiment in general, which influenced people's choices more so than the features available. I did try to give people some background but, of course, I had no way to ensure they'd actually considered or read the background material which did discuss the various features available. When I myself considered the features, the offerings between the two seemed fairly similar, with the exception of Microsoft's SkyDrive service, a service to essentially provide file hosting of almost any kind of file in the cloud. Google's offering doesn't have the equivalent for any kind of file and I could see how a Dropbox-like service could be very useful.

I was surprised by the strong preference for Google across the board, even amongst students. Hotmail (originally owned and developed by Sun Microsystems) has been around a very long time and Microsoft does generally have a very large community of supporters. Again, when considering the free-form comments, some of this was due to security/privacy concerns, with at least some people believing Microsoft had a very poor track record. In addition, there was a common concern about compatibility for multiple operating systems and a belief that Microsoft had not done well with cross-system and open standards issues previously.

So, yes, at least some percentage of people voted on a feeling (and admitted to doing so). I'm looking forward to having some free time to go through the comments more carefully, coding them for common themes, and then do an analysis of the common themes revealed.

As a bit more background information, which you might not have: The Open University's Business Steering Committee had already decided it would be one of the two. They're very close to making a decision based on internal criteria and appropriateness that they've decided. My understanding was that, because the two offerings were basically very close in terms of functionality, the committee was leaning towards one but had not yet made a decision and this might be enough to tip them one way or the other. Ideally, I would have liked to have done a full-scale survey with a more representative sample and additional questions, but I hope this is better than not having any input from the affected people at all.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

I wonder how much of the bias is due to a philosophical dissaffection with MS compared to any practical/functional consideration. I suppose what I’m saying is “do people vote for what is good for them or on a feeling”?

I’m particularly interested as we may be considering a similar move for University of Plymouth, but would only see student feedback like this as a minor factor in the choice of vendor in my personal view. I’d be more interested in a list of features/functions the students wanted prioritized with a mapping exercise to the different offerings. I wonder if you have considered that as an alternative survey format rather than presenting the choice of names of the services?

2) Under "Respondents", I've corrected the associate lecturer section from "22.5 people" to "120 people". Thanks to Mark Spicer for pointing that out.

3) Under "Caveats", I've added in "community members" to the sentence "While I specifically advertised in places where I knew Open University would see the information…"

4) Under "Methodology", the word "no" was replaced with "not" in the original sentence "That was no a realistic choice given that one of the two systems will be adopted. That is also why it is worded as “if you had to choose…”

Apologies for those. They have been corrected in the full report article above.