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The chart you link to is pretend to support the article. They don't have the divisions right - there is no "Office" division at MS. Even though they don't have it right, it still supports my argument - it shows Server and Tools doing more business than Windows. The "Business" division includes Office (with Project and Visio) and the ERP products - Dynamics and CRM. Here is a better breakdown of revenue by division.
 
My point was, Windows and Office do not represent anywhere near 95% of revenue, as the post I was responding to claimed. If you tease all these data sources, it looks like Server and Tools and the ERP/CRM portion of "Business" division represnts over a third of MS revenue.

Ugh. Replies about SSL's being expensive. Please.

SSL is overhead. Let's say that you're facebook, and let's say that the actual cost overhead is 1/1,000,000 of a penny per page served up.

What is facebook's throughput? I have no idea.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook-like-button/

So it's a lot. So much that even if SSL overhead is just one one millionth of a cent per page served up, it is clearly at least hundreds of dollars a month. From the article, I'd guess that it's at least thousands of dollars a month.

Clearly, that's chump change for facebook, but until now, that's all money they've saved. And that's if the overhead is 1/10^6th of a penny. If it's 10^5th we're talking 10's of thousands. If ssl costs 1/10,000 of a penny per page, we're talking 100's of thousands of dollars a month. That starts to add up.

Again, I have absolutely no freaking idea how much overhead it is, and I have no idea their volume. But at the volume they're doing, you can see where any measurable overhead would cost real money.

My guess is that they will throw money at the problem and it'll go away. But they won't be happy to do it.

The new Nokia CEO is Stephen Elop, the former head of Microsoft Corp.’s business unit.
Source.

Also there have been talk of and/or more integration of their services:
https://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2007/aug07/08-22NokiaMSLiveServicesPR.mspx
https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/aug09/08-12pixipr.mspx
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/will-microsoft-and-nokia-team-up-to-take-on-apple-google/

Here's an article from Tech Crunch that gives an indication of the profitability of the experiment.

Seems to me that the move was not a questionable success, but an outright success.

Your post on this is entirely idiotic.

Of course Apple had no idea that they were distributing an App (regardless of which 3rd party submitted it) which contravened the applications original licence GPLv2?

Yet they did/can decide if any App has been developed to use interpreted code? http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/357121/apple-bans-flash-from-iphone-and-ipad

They can manage to filter (censor) this award winning political cartoonist, until the world calls their bluff! http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-bans-satire/ how many less connected voices are also quietly sidelined?

And of course they can prevent Apps with explicit content. http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/did-apple-just-ban-sexual-content-from-the-app-store/

Still the approval process could never have known this was an issue.

The final piece of idiocy in the post is to blame gpl zealots for the fact that a free (in many more ways than you seem to understand) media player won't stay on iOS. One for that matter that enables users to sidestep the frankly idiotic patent/license/drm/locked in nonsense around video, that Apple (and several other corporate interest groups) uses for self serving, anti competitive practices. Not to mention their practices simply disadvantages users. Open formats are better for end users - end of, some things are infrastructure even in capitalism, language for example, why we should even allow formats for video etc to be tied up in IP hell I really don't know.

Frankly VLC doesn't have a proprietary, Apple approved equivalent for a simple reason - such organisations/developers have no interest in empowering you, it is the GPL zealots you complain about that take the risks to challenge these practices.

Still what do I know, why not watch your media on Apples quality media player software, while you're at it, manage your media using the excellent iTunes. I know when I want to move my data from one device I OWN, to another that I OWN, I like to actually "think different"!

Well, yesterday I saw an article on how Apple now has a higher total revenue than Microsoft, but much smaller profits. I guess that's the big con of being a hardware-selling company...

Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.

Problem one: "future value" can't be determined in the present. You can't know today what bits of ephemera will assume great importance next month, or next year, or next century, even if only for a single person.

The vast majority, of course, will remain unimportant. But those terabytes of trivia tossed every day might include the last words and thoughts of your parent or child killed in an accident, or footage of the teens casing your house for next week's burglary, or messages concerning the "arrangement" between a crooked developer and the state politician who'll be leading the Presidential race ten years down the road.

Problem two: we don't need to "forget", we need to ignore. The amount of data we produced in the last 48 hours is greater than the amount of data we (humanity) produced between 2003 and the beginning of time. Even if we persisted nothing for more than 24 hours, we'd still need extensive triage skills just to deal with the new stuff flooding past us. We can, and always will, apply that same triage to the things we retrieve from archives.

You're embarrassed about something you said 20 years ago? Welcome to adulthood. You can't unsay it, and you can't make other people forget it. You can demonstrate that you've learned something in the two subsequent decades. And when you encounter something stupid someone else said 20 years ago, you can give them the same benefit of the doubt -- if they're still saying the same thing, or still promoting that 20-year-old comment, you can (and should) form a bad impression of them; if they're saying the opposite, or specifically repudiating or apologizing for the earlier comment, your impression of them should improve.

Triage can be tuned, adjusted, improved as we learn more about what is and isn't important. Forgetting is absolute and irreversible. The potential cost of forgetting the wrong thing should often justify the known cost of keeping "everything".

Apple said in February 2007 that they would offer DRM free music if allowed. EMI allowed them in May 2007.

Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg said in February 2006 (at the Music 2.0 conference) that the music companies should sell DRM-free music: "Rights management restrictions have created a barrier for consumers, he said, making it a hurdle to transfer music to portable devices, and creating incompatibility between music services and MP3 players."

Bill Gates also expressed his problems with the state of music DRM in December 2006 in an informal Q&A discussing the Mix Conference: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."

Actions speak louder than words I guess. Amazon didn't offer it until January 2008. So technically Apple was the first to offer DRM-free music.

"Technically," eMusic and Amie Street offered DRM-free music way before Apple, but I understand why we aren't counting them in this thread.

However, Yahoo Music acted ("experimented," actually) by offering Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" as a DRM-free MP3 file in July 2006, offred an entire Jesse McCartney album in September 2006, and a Norah Jones single in December 2006.

All this before Steve Jobs made his "bold" statement in Febraury 2007.

That dispels your theory that Amazon was the leader.

Interestigly, Amazon was rumored to be considering an MP3-only music download store in January 2007 (at the latest), before Steve Jobs made his statement.

Technically Google has committed no crime, and their tax avoidance is entirely legal. While it is normal to feel a moral outrage, I think your anger should be focused on those who created the loopholes in the first place. Washington.

Technically Washington has committed no crime, and their acceptance of massive quantities of cash in exchange for favorable tax legislation is entirely legal. While it is normal to feel a moral outrage, I think your anger should be focused on those who paid for the loopholes in the first place. Google. And Microsoft. And a few hundred other large corporations.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/google-spends-1-38-million-on-lobbying-in-q1-up-57-percent-from-last-year/

Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.

You obviously did not have a Sidekick.

> just on the basis of word-of-mouth.

Uh... Firefox was doing word-of-mouth. Chrome is having serious marketing money poured into it. See http://www.vijayforvictory.com/google/london-is-snowed-with-google-chrome-advertisements/2818/ for example, or http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/google-just-advertised-chrome-to-a-million-people-in-the-uk/ (that was around when the European choice screen was coming out, for what it's worth).

So this figure might make sense if it's a reflection of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars poured into advertizing....

I wonder when Facebook will start to sell friends.

Isn't that what Facebooks business model is all about?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_40/b4197064860826.htm

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/02/facebook-bigger-google/

Have you ever purposely screwed over your customers and Apple and refused to be reasonable about it, as suggested by the OP?

I'm an iPhone developer too, and Apple does reserve the right to make you pay the whole refund amount.

I doubt we're supposed to post excerpts from the actual contract, but the relevant one is reproduced here:
http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/apples-iphone-app-refund-policies-could-bankrupt-developers/

You can check it in your own distribution contract in iTunes Connect.

That's why there are also rumors that a amazon is going to launch an android tablet at the same time:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/amazon-android-tablet/

Yea I don't know what is going on today but the quality of many of these summaries has been awful. This one tops it off with numerous mistakes in the title alone.

I'm also not sure what Roblimo's problem with Atlassian or proprietary software is; from my experience Atlassian produces fairly good software and charges far less than competitors.

Also, how about linking to the actual press release or a news story that contains more than commentary?

You can read the long and not very interesting interview but if you can believe anything Zuckerberg says, they're building a framework for mobile devices that lets apps hook into the FB social network. They don't have the time to build their own OS, so it'll probably be on Android.

They wish everything supported HTML5 so they could stop writing platform-specific apps, but recognize the realities of the market.

It was a couple days ago, but that seems to be all I got out of it.

Naysayers of the iPad miss the point? Huh, here I thought that all the hype about desktop, laptops and netbooks being killed off by iPads was created by Apple fans.

A small sample:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175600/The_iPad_is_the_future_for_home_computing
http://gizmodo.com/5506692/ipad-is-the-future
http://www.macworld.com/article/146038/2010/01/ipad_future_shock.html
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/ipad-future/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/ipad/

So true. Here are some other (more mature) projects that DO put focus on protocols.

http://ostatus.org/
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/onesocialweb-were-ahead-of-diaspora-in-the-creation-of-an-open-facebook/

See also:
http://xmpp.org/xmpp-protocols/xmpp-core/

Well, google provides over 80% of the Mozilla Foundation's funding, and Mozilla pays $3000 per bug, so effectively Google is paying bounties for other browsers.

TechCrunch had a really good post a few days ago about carriers exploiting the openness of Android. Worth a read.

oh you mean twitter annotations http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/02/twitter-annotations-testing/

...that the carriers are beginning to resort to their old tricks on the new Android phones? Stuff like replacing Google search with Bing and not letting you change it back, loading phones up with unremovable crapware, locking down tethering, banning installation of non-Marketplace apps, etc.

Before anyone replies, "Well, just root the phone to get around that stuff! Duh!" let me remind you that geeks who are willing and able to do so are far, far outnumbered by normal people who just want to use their goddamn phone, not tinker with it.

Why doing the filming of course. Big Fail for Microsoft...

Which feature of Flash is impossible to re-implement? Using the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 is the only one I can think of, and even that is being worked on and should be quickly resolved in the near future.

Heck, they've even ported Quake to HTML5. That is quite a bit more advanced program than most Flash apps.

Looks like you get the shaft either way:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/09/android-open/

From the TechCrunch article that reported about streaming search awhile back:

“At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more on our blog.”

The google blog states that they randomly select which computers get used for testing new features like streaming search.

"if those android game devs were deveoping on apple's platform they'd be SOL."

Um, Gameloft does make iPHone games, a lot of iPhone games, making $25 million from iPhone apps in 2009.

"I've certainly heard enough horror stories about the review process to turn me off from ever trying to sell anything on the iphone."

Sure there's a review process, but judging from how many apps make it obviously it's not bad, and with 200,000+ apps I'd be shocked if there wasn't somebody complaining about the process.

I'm sure you won't be missed, plenty of developers are becoming millionaires off iPhone apps, you don't have to be one of them. How many Android millionaires are there? After 2 years not one Android developer has made a million dollars from apps. In fact Android developers celebrate making "up to" 100k a year

Besides Android has it's own major problems, like a 24 hour return on apps: according to one Android developer, you can return any Android app for a full refund within 24 hours. Talk about fail, no wonder Android developers are broke when users can instantly download apps, use them, and then return it for a full refund and repeat the process anytime they want.

Sorry but Android is a joke, Google does not make money from Android while the iPhone is Apple's cash cow. If the iPhone vanished tomorrow Apple would be in serious pain, but if Android vanished tomorrow Google wouldn't even notice, so Apple will fight tooth-and-nail to make sure the iPhone maintains it's Jesusphone status while Google will continue to ignore Android.

cause the guys at the top are the ones making that decision, and would never dream of putting something like that in that may one day limit their ability to make millions.

Nice thought, but actually he had a non-compete agreement. They just never hold up in California courts. That's why they use the trade secrets angle.

Mark Hurd will do a great job at Oracle good acquisition by Larry Ellison.

According to an article at TechCrunch, he didn't do too well at HP: "Word on the street is Hurd wasn’t let go for his affair or even for his embellishment of trivial expense reports. Instead the board kicked him out because his employee approval rating was absolutely atrocious."

Even so, if it's empty today, imagine how full it will be in a year, even if people only every use it when they're buying stuff. The first match I found on a basic search ( http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/itunes-sells-6-billion-songs-and-other-fun-stats-from-the-philnote/ ) says Apple sold a billion songs from June 2008 to January 2009. A billion songs in six months, a year and a half ago. They're probably doing a billion songs every 4 months, maybe a billion per quarter by now.* Also I've heard reports, and wouldn't be surprised, if it can build a list of what you have--same way it can download album art, even for stuff your ripped or downloaded.

I'm at the age where I, too, "don't have time" for all these things kids are doing, but somehow Facebook and the rest get along fine without people like us.

* I just remembered Apple's PR library. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25itunes.html So they sold 4 billion songs in the 13 months from 1/2009 to 2/1010. Assuming they're growing, even at a small rate, they're above a billion songs per quarter by now. Let's pretend a quarter is 100 days--that's TEN MILLION SONGS PER DAY. It won't take very long for Ping to fill with data. Even if one user in a thousand uses it, that's 10,000 entries per day.

That said, I agree with your conclusion. This won't set the social world on fire--twitter and FB have nothing to worry about here--but it'll be gangbusters for marketing.

Odd that all the articles cite TechCrunch as the source of the rumor yet this guy from Barrons, says it's untrue.

A test of the new Apple data center.

I read that this event was used to test out the ability of the new data center that Apple built. I assume that the new Apple TV content will be served from this site, and they wanted a good test to see how well it worked out.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/apple-data-center/

3Par has technology and patents on "light provisioning" systems, that enables disk space to be allocated only when applications need capacity, greatly reducing IT management costs. Think of it as storage on a just-enough and just-in-time basis.

But basically it's because ex-CEO Hurd killed HP's R&D budget. With no R&D, HP is attempting to buy its way into the next big thing.

Hurd deserved to go. Killing off R&D to the point where you have to spend billions buying your way back into the game smacks of a certain lack of foresight and intelligence, does it not?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/behind-the-bidding-war-the-real-reasons-why-hp-and-dell-are-so-desperate-for-3par/?

Firefox is, I think, one of the most used products in companies around the world and I am sure almost none of the companies contribute back to that project.

That's probably the worst example you could have picked :P. Firefox is one of the products of which almost all users contribute back to it. If you use the search bar at the right top, you're contributing to Firefox. They make millions from this.

I agree with you about tipping though. I think it's outdated and unnecessary. Either include it in the bill or don't expect it.

Teachbook appears to be a social/community website, close to the area of what Facebook does. I would think that the "teachbook" name was chosen on purpose to be "facebook for teachers/teaching". Well, you can't do that without facebook going after you. IANAL so I don't know if facebook can or should prevail, but it seems to me that they sort of have a point.
Now, contrast this to a previous action of facebook: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/10/facebook-placebook/
They went after a startup travel website, i.e. a site for you to book vacations in the places you visit called... well... placebook! I mean who better for the name placebook than a site where you book... places... The site in question had, in the end, to back down and change their name to triptrace: http://blog.triptrace.com/2010/08/19/we-tell-the-world-placebook-is-now-triptrace/ . Now THAT was ridiculous.

Look, I *love* Firefox. I use it pretty much exclusively myself. Nothing can touch add-ons like NoScript, AdBlock, etc. (and most of my add-ons and their associated functionality can't be found on Chrome, Opera, etc.). But if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts. And speed has always been one of Chrome's few positive qualities over Firefox.

Firefox already has the technical lead over Chrome in a number of areas. Here's one such example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIZUdZdFzOo

Safari can also best Chrome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap-UmnHXPFw

Not only that, but Mozilla can't afford to license h264. And that already puts them behind on HTML5. I am hoping that either html5 never catches on, the other browsers all agree to an open format (like WebM)

YouTube is rolling out WebM encodes at a steady pace. Both of the videos I linked to above are available in WebM. I no longer have Flash installed as I've found I already don't need it. Firefox 4, Opera, Chrome 6 all support WebM natively. Safari and IE9 can both use it if the codec is installed. Support for WebM is broad. Now it's up to the mobile devices to catch up. My phone is capable of hardware accelerated WebM playback. It just needs the software to do it.

or there is some kind of flash-player type add-on made for Firefox to support h264. But without one of those, Firefox is (sadly) already in a rough spot for the next gen.

You mean, a player like Adobe Flash? ;-)

Who said anything about that? Your comment above is completely incorrect, that's the issue here. H.264 is in fact the dominant video format on the web right now, so your post is just blatantly misleading and/or ignorant.

Look, I *love* Firefox. I use it pretty much exclusively myself. Nothing can touch add-ons like NoScript, AdBlock, etc. (and most of my add-ons and their associated functionality can't be found on Chrome, Opera, etc.). But if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts. And speed has always been one of Chrome's few positive qualities over Firefox.

Not only that, but Mozilla can't afford to license h264. And that already puts them behind on HTML5. I am hoping that either html5 never catches on, the other browsers all agree to an open format (like WebM), or there is some kind of flash-player type add-on made for Firefox to support h264. But without one of those, Firefox is (sadly) already in a rough spot for the next gen.

And I say all that as someone who hates the idea of giving up my Firefox and having to get my browser from an increasingly-evil Google, an already evil Microsoft, or a closed-off Opera. If I wanted evil and closed, I would have bought an iPad, not a netbook.

From my recollection of the events from Gizmodo, the police, with a search warrant, came in and confiscated items on the search warrant. In the report from the Gizmodo editor, no mention of SWAT was mentioned. But please don't let facts get in your way. After a raid with SWAT sounds much more sensational.

with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.

A - nothing "game changing" about ANY of those.
MP3 players (both hardware and software) existed for years before iPod.
So did mobile phones - many of them far better and more innovative than iPhone. FFS how many generations was it before iPhone was able to use MMS and copy/paste?
And iPad is nothing more than a big iPod. Again... tablets have been around for years before that.

Yes, Google did develop a nice email system and some mapping software, but these were incremental innovations.

B - Seriously? Some mapping software?
Was there actually something like Google Maps and Google Earth before Google released those? Something that I'm not aware of?
For free, might I add. Just like that "nice email system" that made mailbox sizes a thing of the past.
When was the last time Apple or MS gave away anything like that for free?

And C - ScuttleMonkey is basically contradicting himself.
First he goes on how patents are bad and tosses around an example of Apple and "over 1000 patents" connected to the iPhone.
Then, he goes on about patents being inherently bad for the "innovators" - and again tossing around an example of Apple as an innovator.

Well gosh darn! Apple must be magical like their commercials claim.
Not only is it an innovator, but a behemoth who is an innovator AND one that is immune to the patent-poison too.

And then he ends it all on a piece de resistance of this whole ordeal by making patents OK - but only if you are a startup.

Simply put, if we are serious about lifting the economy out of its rut, we need to focus all of our energy on helping entrepreneurs.
Provide them with the incentives (tax breaks and seed financing); education; and infrastructure.
And gear public policy--like patent-protection laws--toward the startups.

Not sure how is that supposed to work though.
Only startups get to patent things?
"Behemoths" like MS, Apple, Google, IBM etc. will not be allowed to buy patents? Or startups?
What good would it do to a startup then to patent anything unless they can sell or license it to make much needed cash?
And what will happen to a startup that grows into a "behemoth"? Google was a startup too about a decade ago.

Should startups and "behemoths" REALLY be forced to choose between making a profit and innovating - through legislation?
Gee... I wonder which path would they choose.

Nice, story published hours after it was revealed to be a hoax / stunt: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/elyse-porterfield/

Patents are ultimately written by patent lawyers, even if they are attributed to the people who originally came up with the idea. In this particular case the patent lawyers are listed. From my experience patent lawyers throw all kinds of crap into the patent and get it mixed up with other patents they might be filing at the same time.

In any case it is probably a bad idea to put in diagrams from other companies apps, but as this TechCrunch article mentions, it is probably not Apple's intention to be stealing from Ralph Lauren or GuideYou (or Where To).
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/apple-patent-diagrams-send-the-wrong-message-to-developers/

Well, it seems that Techcrunch has the skinny on who really bought the thing. It appears to be Titan Gaming

OMG, someone on the FORUM said that Xfire was bought by 3D Realms! It MUST be true!

Seriously, the only thing that I see on that forum is saying that some unknown company, "Titan Games", bought them out. TechCrunch says the same.

When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads?

2007 and earlier.

I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is they're afraid that it would be seen as an anti-competitive move against Google ...

Oh, it's very competitive. Whenever Microsoft arrives late to the game, you know they bring lots of money with them. Why has Bing Cashback stopped?

The problem with your post is that you can't imagine a company being both a "spooty ad company" and a company that actually makes actual products. You don't have to be one or the other.

We already know from this conference that "Jackeeey Wallpaper" collects and publishes phone numbers and browser history from the phone

Actually what we know is that no such thing happened and that nearly the whole story was made up. I suppose it is still fun to spread the FUD around though!

google ported quake to html5:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/google-html5-quake/

so to answer your first question: yes.

I'm pretty sure HTML5 can access your camera and mic, although I'm not 100% on that. They can also work when you're offline, using the iPhones built-in caching.

It doesn't have to get ported to an open platform to hurt Facebook. It just has to be ported to any other platform, which is already happening.

[...] the iPad represents the first new change in computer interfaces in my lifetime. If there is something which is even similar, I'm unaware of it.

Depending on how similar you are aiming for, there were dozens of devices before the iPad.
But off the top of my head, how about internet-enabled, keyboardless, flat touchscreen computers from Archos in 2006? Apple even copied the lack of flash ;)

There were also several tablets by Nokia, starting as early as 2005.

Then we have the CrunchPad, a project which started in 2008 but failed because they were screwed over by investors. The device was more or less the same as the iPad if you adapt the hardware +2 years, except that it used Ubuntu with the repositories instead of iOS with the AppStore.

No, Apple neither revolutionised anything nor introduced an interface change to the market.
Yes, they took existing ideas and technology and made them successful through marketing, a shiny package and unparalleled hype.
They did great in helping popularise tablets, and that's a good thing. I'm just trying to explain that rampant over-attribution happening in Apple's case: just because it has a nice looking exterior this doesn't mean that it functions flawlessly.
Apples hardware isn't any higher quality than for example HP's. I know first hand, I own a MBP :)

I wonder if you can take any widget, give it a nice hull and push it through Apple's marketing machinery (which is clearly one of the world's finest). I assume they would sell millions of devices of whatever.

Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet, but it looks like at least part of the reason for the delay are "unforeseen requirements" that weren't in the initial arrangement with the city that Google's had to deal with. For example:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/26/google-city-of-los-angeles-apps-delay-is-overblown/

As for the delay, Google says that they are working with with the City of LA to "address requirements that were not included in the original contract." One example of these possible requirements that came up is that the LAPD wants to conduct background checks on all Google employees that have access to Google Apps data in the cloud. Doing these checks of course add more time to the adminstrative clock.

LAPD background checks on Google employees may very well be a reasonable request, but things like this add time to the schedule and weren't part of the original contract.