Google in preemptive strike on Microsoft Office 365 Google Apps product manager Shan Sinha was once director of strategy for Microsoft SharePoint, Redmond's longstanding effort to facilitate business collaboration over the net. Sinha left Microsoft in the fall of 2007 to create DocVerse, a service that bypassed SharePoint, plugging Microsoft Office clients into Google Apps. …
So, are you saying that Google look/scan the contents of the private documents you store on their servers via apps? And use that data for advertising purposes? Or sell it on to others?
Is that specifically what you are saying? Do you have any evidence to support that statement?
I always thought updating corporate client software was done with ultra caution, for fear of breaking some compatability that the whole company relied on. If Google (or any other web apps company) start pushing these out to automatically, surely it will eventually create problems? As I always tell people, I can't be perfect ALL the time!
"It's offering a plug-in that transforms Outlook into a Gmail client."
Don't use Outlook, but I imagine it supported IMAP already? I've used Thunderbird with Google hosted mail for a significant time using IMAP, does fine for me.
As for security, how many people who wouldn't trust Google hosting their docs happily send the same docs attached to email across the net without any encryption. Come on folks, hands up. You've all done it.
I'm the owner of a SME and I really don't get the comments here. I don't care about Google (or Microsoft) looking into my stuff: I'm not competing with them and I know they won't sell my stuff to my competitors. They'll send me even more targetted ads: more power to them and I really don't mind.
Google Docs are wonderful: I work with people on three continents and we share documents using Google Docs all the time. Oh, btw, we're an IT company. We use the Google Docs API to automatically populate some spreadsheets, etc. Not only we don't need to pay the Microsoft tax anymore (Google Docs works fine on OS X and Linux, goodbye Windows licences, goodbye Office licences) but moreover our docs are available everywhere, at anytime. Offline backups are trivial to do. No more versioning issues.
There are so many advantages. Way easier computer park administration too btw.
You guys better adopt to office suites being "in the cloud" (either Google or Microsoft) because they're here to stay and to keep on gaining market share every day. A lot of people that try them simply get hooked: it's just too convenient. And, no, neither Google nor Microsoft will disappear tomorrow so your data is safe. Moreover as I already wrote backups are trivial and the APIs very cool (at least for Google docs).
"In 2010, Google says, its services were up 99.984 per cent of the time. And through first several months of 2011, they're at 99.9949 per cent. That translates to about five minutes of downtime per month."
Yes, that's one end of the link. Now, what about your connection, the ISP, BT outages for DSL subscribers etc, not forgetting how easy DDoS attacks have proven to be just lately. It's alright for the server to be accepting connections when you yourself can't reach the bugger. That'll make you feel a whole lot better, won't it?
Stupid, stupid idea that is only gaining momentum because it's being pushed hard so that vendors can sell us storage solutions labelled "local cloud cache" or "high availability local storage" or some other whalesong-induced bollocks sometime down the line when they decide their revenue is down. Cyclic sales...
In the old (pre-80s) days of computing, a mainframe hosted the OS, the apps and the data, and users accessed the system with dumb terminals.
Then came the era of the PC, with OS, apps and data on each machine, with a central file server to store and access data.
There was a transitional phase, when companies opted for off-site backup services.
Now we have the cloud. It functions like a mainframe, and PCs function like dumb terminals.
When using the off-site data backup or the cloud, the first trade-off is security. With all data on-site, all employees are on-site, too. (Yes, there are people who work off-site; however, their hiring is done by the company.) Businesses can screen potential employees; they can't screen potential employees of cloud companies. That's an aspect of the on-site/off-site debate that others haven't addressed.
The second trade-off that occurs to me is the one-size-fits-nobody cloud apps. For instance, one of my clients is a medical transcription business. They use a third-party medical dictionary in Word. They're stuck with Windows and Word and the third-party spell-checker. Just as they can't use Linux and a Linux office word processing app, a general-purpose cloud word processing app, even if it were high end, would be useless to them.
The cloud is a forward-into-the-past move back to the era of the mainframe, without the security provided by an on-site system.
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