Category: Google
November 5th, 2009
Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus
While most observers portray Microsoft’s sortie into online email and collaboration services as a titanic battle to keep Google off its productivity applications turf, the real target of this week’s price reductions is IBM’s Lotus unit. In a briefing earlier this week, Ron Markezich, corporate VP, Microsoft Online Services told me that most of his team’s customer wins are at the expense of the IBM division: “Seventy-five percent of our enterprise customers are coming from a non-Microsoft platform — predominantly [Lotus] Notes.”
The half-price reduction for hosted Exchange seats (from $10 to $5 per month) and a one-third cut in the cost of the full BPOS suite (from $15 to $10) is designed to keep those deals flowing through. IBM earlier this year introduced its own hosted LotusLive iNotes service at an aggressive $36 per user per year. Microsoft’s old pricing was at a level destined to give prospects pause for thought. At $60 per year, it’s close enough to raise fewer objections. The lower pricing will surely help, too, in those cases where Google’s $50-a-year service is the competition.
Interestingly, we now have a market price established for online corporate email services in the $35 to $60 per year range (indicative of a new price range for all categories of enterprise software?). As Microsoft VP Chris Capossela told CNET’s Ina Fried, “it’s the price that customers are really excited to buy our suite at … We’re pretty excited about the price and not so much focused on free services or the price Google or others might charge.” You bet.
Microsoft execs were happy enough to focus on Google when it came to throwing brickbats this week. Every briefing seems to have included a drive-by shooting directed at Google. “It takes more than a few billboards to win enterprise accounts,” Markezich told me, in a reference to his rival’s current ‘Going Google’ ad campaign. “There’s been a lot of investment in billboards. I question how much investment there’s been in enterprise capabilities.”
There’s also been a concerted effort to question the size of Google’s paying customer base. While Gmail is hitting the volume mass market, Microsoft currently has the edge in large enterprise accounts. Google spent a lot of PR dollars to promote its recent win of a 35,000-seat account at Rentokil Initial, along with its 30,000-seat contract with City of Los Angeles. Microsoft Online Services is currently scoring much larger wins, including a 110,000-seat implementation at pharma giant GSK, a “large number” of which are already deployed, Markezich told me. He also disclosed the existence of a much larger, as yet unnamed customer, currently “in the midst of deployment” to more than 300,000 users.
September 24th, 2009
Why you should be glad about Gmail failures
Gmail is having problems again today and some users are squirming while others aren’t worried.
Of course it’s a hassle when Gmail’s not there any more — I found my work rhythm was interrupted and instead of writing and sending some emails as I’d planned, I had to switch to another task and they’re still sitting on my to-do list now. But the way I look at it, every Gmail outage is a small investment I’m willing to make towards a future when I’ll be able to take its reliability utterly for granted.
With every Gmail fail, Google learns more about operating a cloud-scale, enterprise-class email infrastructure. While it may be true that Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have more registered users and traffic, neither of them are trying to attract enterprise customers as Google is with its Google Apps suite (of which Gmail is the flagship application). That means no one has ever attempted what Gmail is now doing, and with each slip-up along the way, it learns how to do it better.
Remember the big outage that affected the Gmail web interface on the 1st of this month? Read the rest of this entry »
July 15th, 2009
Users have to wise up to cloud security
Several observers have noted that the theft of confidential Twitter documents (which ended up in the hands of TechCrunch) took place by accessing a Twitter employee’s Google Apps account. Cue a chorus of commentary alleging how this shows that if you want to keep stuff private, don’t put it on the web, period, because cloud security is not ready for prime time and nothing is secure on the net.
OK, so let’s go back to storing confidential company documents on laptops that people leave in cars or forget on trains, or transferring them on computer tape and CD-ROMs that couriers deliver to the wrong address, or backing them up to USB sticks that go missing, or forgetting to wipe them off the hard disks of office servers when we dispose of them (UPDATE: see Michael Krigsman’s post on the same topic for a catalog of examples). Cloud security is no different from real-world security. It’s just a matter of identifying the risks and containing them.
Users really like the convenience of the cloud — far too much for them to give it up — but the trouble is, they also like the convenience of authentication using a simple username-password pair. They haven’t yet figured out that’s far too little to separate your confidential data from a nefarious interloper, especially when the Web means that authentication will work from anywhere, which dramatically increases the threat level. In the Twitter case, as my ZDNet colleague Sam Diaz points out, the security breach exploited “an easy-to-guess password and recovery question,” which is one of the simplest ways to make a username and password combination really insecure. Unfortunately, users they won’t wise up until the cloud providers force them to.
The banks figured this out long ago, and they knew they had to sort it because customers were losing money and blaming them. As a result, I now have to answer ‘challenge questions’ before I can access any of my online banking services. I have to remember a user ID and two passwords to access my personal current account, and to authorise a bill payment I have to insert my chip-and-pin debit card into a special reader, type in the pin number plus some other data and then copy a code that the reader generates into the payment authorization page. My business bank account requires a user ID, a password and a code generated by a separate security device. All this is a pain but I put up with it because I don’t want my bank to make it easy for other people to defraud me of my money. Nor do I want to go back to the days of having to write out checks and put them in the mail or waiting till my statement arrives at the end of the month to find out how much money I have left.
Now it’s up to cloud providers to inflict the same pain on their users — for their own sake — to protect their data. We won’t like it, but we’ll put up with it because at the end of the day we’d rather jump through all those hoops than give up all the convenience the cloud brings us.
July 8th, 2009
Microsoft, hoist by a Chrome petard
As one Talkback commenter recalled during the discussion of my post earlier this week on free as a business model, Microsoft long ago used free as a weapon to capture the nascent Web browser market:
“Remember in 94 when Microsoft suddenly realised they had completely missed the internet boat? Netscape was THE browser, Microsoft didn’t even have a browser. Solution? Freemium it! Microsoft went to Mosiac … Then they shafted Mosaic and Netscape all in one go by giving the browser away ‘free’. Mosaic, who did all the development effort for what is now IE, were shafted. Netscape were also shafted. So there you have a lesson on how ‘free’ is done.”
Now Microsoft is shafted by the same tactic (or, in the Shakespearian idiom, ‘hoist by his own petard‘ — a petard being a medieval word for a bomb). Google’s new Chrome OS (see Techmeme discussion) will be a free-of-charge, open-source competitor to the Windows operating system, which is such a cashcow for Microsoft that its license fee is routinely described as a ‘tax’ on PC owners.
I’m old enough to remember when Microsoft worked with Intel and Compaq to make an end-run around IBM back in the late 1980’s, sabotaging the larger vendor’s abortive attempt to create a new PC operating system called OS/2 that would be a successor to the older PC-DOS developed for IBM by Microsoft. Windows triumphed over OS/2 because IBM moved too slowly and was too internally focused on its own roadmap for developing the PC to understand Read the rest of this entry »
May 5th, 2009
Web giants and the helpless individual
Like many users of technology today, I have developed an essentially dysfunctional approach when things don’t work properly: I do whatever it takes to avoid fixing it. I wait to see if it ‘fixes itself’. I make a workaround. I live with it till the next upgrade. Or I just use something else. It’s only when I absolutely can’t function without resolving the problem that I take a deep breath, grit my teeth, and embark on the quest to find a solution.
My worst nightmare is to find myself in the kind of situation frequently described in anguished blog posts by victims of Google, Amazon or eBay glitches and terminations. I’ve been collecting a few samples recently:
- When Amazon fails, it does so big time ranted fellow Enterprise Irregular Dennis Howlett last weekend after an ill-fated attempt to buy a high-spec digital camera from the online retailer. A security exception on his order triggered a defective process that closed his account with no viable means of getting it reopened.
- Nobody Can Hear You Scream If Your RSS Feed Is Dead wrote Louis Gray back in March when a glitch at Blogger wiped out his entire RSS feed, including all archives (among other casualties of the same glitch, Kent Newsome provided an entertaining and informative account).
- Google is Evil, Worse than PayPal: Don’t use Google Checkout for your business wrote Amy Hoy later the same month when her website’s Checkout account was disabled with no notification, no explanation and no appeal.
- Don’t ever use Google Apps for anything important, wrote an anonymous poster to the Business of Software discussion community in January after being “stuck in this kafkaesque place” that is Google Apps support. [Updated 5 May at 22:52. An earlier version of this item incorrectly attributed the comment to Joel Spolsky, who is not having any problems with Google].
- Hello, Google, is anyone in there? I wrote last summer after several incidents when Googla Apps users were locked out of their accounts with no information.
As is the norm when these mass-market automated online services fail, the victims Read the rest of this entry »
April 23rd, 2009
Microsoft's software-plus-services disinformation
My blood boils every time I hear some Microsoft executive crowing about its so-called ’software-plus-services’ model. Microsoft’s FUD around S+S is deliberately muddling up two very different things. I fumed when I read this comment in an interview last week by Chris Capossella, senior VP of the group that oversees Office, in which he singles out Google’s use of Gears technology to enable offline use of its cloud-based applications:
“I thought the whole point [of the software-as-a-service model] was that I didn’t have to download anything,” Capossella said. “These guys are totally adopting the software-plus-services approach, but they just aren’t using the term. And no one’s calling them on it.”
This is so lame as a line of attack, and yet it’s a favorite at Microsoft, as if Google’s decision to take advantage of the compute power that’s there on the client justifies in one fell swoop not only Microsoft’s entire legacy stack of desktop-bound applications and operating software but also the whole gamut of its extended server family. Extending cloud-based services so that they’ll run locally in a few limited use cases is in no way equivalent to Microsoft’s policy of encouraging its customers to keep buying and upgrading their installed base of server and desktop software in return for assurances that the vendor has a strategy of offering the “choice” of cloud-based equivalents.
My opposition to the ’software-plus-services’ mantra is that it puts the cart before the horse. If you’re going to do cloud computing right, you have to start with services. I wouldn’t be debating this with Microsoft if Read the rest of this entry »
February 26th, 2009
Another outage, another dashboard
From the I-told-you-so department. Finally, Google has followed a long line of leading SaaS and cloud providers trying to break into the enterprise market in introducing a status dashboard for Google Apps.
I called on Google to do this in August last year, warning that if the company didn’t do so, it would not only be bad for Google’s reputation but also for the rest of the industry:
“If it doesn’t take suitable action, the snowballing subscriber volumes of businesses that are signing up for Google Apps are going to get a poor introduction to SaaS, which is no good for Google and bad for the industry as a whole.”
So, yesterday there was a Gmail outage and today, guess what? Google rolls out a status dashboard it just happened to have waiting in the wings. Why oh why do providers always, always have to wait until after a damaging outage before they do this? Wait, didn’t I already say that exactly one year ago? Read the rest of this entry »
February 25th, 2009
Did privacy laws bring down Gmail yesterday?
I was idly scanning The Register’s write-up of yesterday’s Gmail outage in Europe when this explanation from Gmail reliability manager Acacio Cruz caught my eye:
“Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data centre in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.”
Why is Google developing code to keep data ‘geographically close to its owner’? Europe’s privacy laws, is my guess. This is a topic I’ve been following over on The Connected Web, where I recently posted about a phenomenon I’ve called data protectionism: “One important obligation on any business operating within the EU is a continuing responsibility to ensure the security and privacy of data transferred elsewhere.” This week I followed up with news of a World Privacy Forum report that helpfully spells out all the implications for cloud providers and consumers.
Here’s how this ends up bringing down Gmail:
- Google successfully recruits several large European enterprises to Google Apps;
- Those businesses express concern about their data privacy obligations under EU law;
- Google’s engineers start developing algorithms to keep data from straying beyond certain geographic territories;
- Those algorithms behave unexpectedly during a routine upgrade;
- Gmail goes down.
I have no evidence for this chain of events apart from what Cruz wrote, but why else would Google want to keep data “geographically close to its owner”? In cloud computing terms, the notion is almost absurd — and of course absurdity is precisely the sort of thing that produces unexpected outcomes in any system.
Absurd though it may seem, the point is a crucial one for cloud providers to take on board. Their infrastructures are going to have to build in awareness of real-world jurisdictions so that providers and their customers can demonstrate compliance with undertakings on matters of national law such as data privacy, intellectual property rights and taxation. Shifting data across a national boundary during an outage can have serious legal repercussions, and the cloud has got to take that into account — but without falling over.
January 28th, 2009
Google adds offline and 'flaky' modes to Gmail
Traveling through the French countryside at up to 186 mph, the Eurostar high-speed train service is a great place to put Google’s new offline Gmail service (announcement, Techmeme) through its paces. Connection via a 3G card (there’s no wifi on the train) is bound to be intermittent at best. But it works, says Dave Armstrong, head of marketing, Google Enterprise EMEA, who like 20,000 other Googlers has been testing the new feature for the past couple months.
Although the majority of the blogosphere comment this morning remarks that “finally” Gmail has an offline mode for disconnected working (albeit only in a Labs version for now), I’d say the delay is more than compensated by an innovation that Google’s developers have named “Flaky connection mode”, for those times when you’re connected intermittently. That’s the mode Armstrong was putting to the test on his recent Eurostar trip. In ‘flaky’ mode, the client connects when it can, but in the meantime the user keeps on working even when it can’t.
Flaky mode works with whatever data the Gmail client has downloaded at the time. So if you find yourself unexpectedly disconnected without invoking offline mode, you can enter flaky mode and carry on while awaiting a reconnection. Of course you must already have enabled the offline capability, which downloads your historical data — you can decide how far back to go.
This solves a problem that to my mind is much bigger than totally disconnected working, as I outlined a couple of years back when discussing the topic of offline users:
“The key point at issue here is that intermittent disconnection is an inherent fact of life in a network environment, and that a truly robust on-demand application design will accommodate disconnection in a transparent and non-disruptive manner.”
People talk about utility computing as if it automatically implies ‘always on’ networking. But if computing today really were only as pervasive as electricity, we’d be far worse off than we are with all our wireless access to live connectivity. Even so, we still need to cache that connectivity from time to time, just as we store electricity in a battery to tide us over until our next charge. This is what Google has achieved in its “flaky connection” mode.
“There’s a very real need [for offline working] for those traveling on planes and trains,” Armstrong admitted (not to mention conference rooms buried deep in hotel basements, I would add), as well as Read the rest of this entry »
January 14th, 2009
Google endorses the cloud channel
With the launch of its Authorized Reseller program today, Google publicly acknowledges something that’s been privately evident for some time: most all its significant enterprise wins for Google Apps wouldn’t have happened without partners to champion and manage the implementation (another SaaS partner myth debunked).
There are plenty of examples in the US, but for an even clearer demonstration of the role played by Google’s partners, look to France. With six out of Google’s ten biggest European early adopters, enterprise adoption of Google Apps in France is way ahead of its neighbours (including the UK). Google’s big wins there (including one 10,000-user account) have been brought on board by Paris-based Revevol (pronounced ‘rev-evol’), whose founders first visited Google’s California headquarters to discuss the emerging opportunity six months before Google Apps was formally launched.
“We have brought to Google many clients because of this work we have been doing the past two years,” Revevol’s CEO Laurent Gasser told me yesterday, emphasizing Google’s debt to his company: “Once you have that type of traction in the market, it’s easier to get going.”
Google’s dependence on partners is similar in the US — albeit with a larger band of them, including Appirio [disclosure: a recent client], SADA Systems, Horizon Info Services and the evocatively named Cloud Sherpas. Look under the covers of any significant enterprise win and you’ll see Read the rest of this entry »
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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