Until this year, the Oregon Department of Education ran a central portal of thousands of learning resources that required all teachers and students to have an email address as authentication for security purposes. Because many districts didn't offer student email, the learning materials were not available to everyone. In April, Oregon became the first state to offer the Google Apps Education Edition to all public schools when it signed an agreement to make the tools available to any district in the state that requested a Google domain. Meanwhile, the Kentucky Department of Education wanted improved capability to provide email services to the more than 700,000 students, teachers, and staff. Kentucky went with Microsoft rather than Google because it already was using Microsoft Exchange, and its active directory is a Microsoft product. The most appealing for both states is that the powerful applications they chose are free. The author reports on how computing giants compete to provide online applications to school districts--for free. [For the complete version of this article, see EJ897628.]