Slashdot Mirror
Los Angeles Goes Google Apps With Microsoft Cash
Dan Jones writes "The Los Angeles City Council has approved a US$7.25 million, five-year deal with Google in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps. Interestingly, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft (Microsoft paid $70 million three years ago to settle the suit by six California counties and cities who alleged that Microsoft used its monopoly position to overcharge for software). The city will migrate from Novell GroupWise e-mail servers. For security, Google will provide a new separate data environment called 'GovCloud' to store both applications and data in a completely segregated environment that will only be used by public agencies. This GovCloud would be encrypted and 'physically and logically segregated' from Google's standard applications. Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?"
Are the government servers more reliable, or more secure than the regular servers? If that's the case, what does that say about the peons who don't have access to it?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Does this mean I will be losing some of the 7385 MB available for my inbox space? I'm already using a whole 1% of that!
There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular.
The biggest thing is space. In my(admittedly modest; but definitely nonzero) experience, users really, really hate dealing with storage quotas and love doing things(like storing files in the form of email attachments) that bump them into quotas. Unless the LA IT guys were unusually generous, or their deal with Google unusually stingy, most user's quotas will probably go up substantially. Plus, with Google doc's sharing functions, there will hopefully be much less attachment clutter eating email quota space.
Aside from heavy users of particular Office functions, who will almost certainly end up retaining local copies of office one way or another(whether it be official IT department policy, or local departmental budgets, or some other means), most people will probably care more about not bumping into quotas than anything else.
If I understood this right, Microsoft was found guilty of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain monopolies in other sectors. If they no longer have a monopoly in other sectors, this would reinforce the decision.
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
No.
What it has done is given IT administrators the opportunity to pass the buck when there's a problem with a system. Now when the e-mail system goes down for hours and employees can't access crucial data, the IT admin simply points at Google and says "it's not my fault or my problem".
That's all cloud computing offers. Unless you're a bit paranoid, in which case it also provides a single-point of attack for the government to eavesdrop under the banner of "keeping America safe".
That would be like JK Rowling using her "monopoly position" on Harry Potter to overcharge for her books. They made it, they should be able to set the price for their product.
No, actually it's nothing like that. Reading a book doesn't require anything proprietary and it doesn't have to work with other software, etc.
But I'm sure you have more knowledge about the case than the judge who made the decision.
The is the whole point of a "monopoly position", they didn't just make a product, they eliminated all other reasonable alternatives to their product, creating an artificially high price.
Your JK Rowling analogy is missing the part where JK Rowling buys up every other publishing company, shuts them down, turns the book industry into a harry Potter monoculture, and makes Harry Potter the only book series on the planet aside from a few hold outs that have the creativity to write their own books.
I think this is a step towards relieving MS of their monopoly, even on OSs.
How long until LA city employees don't need Windows for anything. If everything they do is in the browser, they can use Linux (maybe in the guise of ChromeOS)
No, actually it's nothing like that. Reading a book doesn't require anything proprietary and it doesn't have to work with other software, etc.
Neither does your OS. It wouldn't be good for business, but there's no requirement that the OS must work with anything else. How is your statement relevant to my analogy, again? It's like arguing that I've made a false analogy because JK Rowling is a woman and Bill Gates is a man - it's true, but irrelevant.
But I'm sure you have more knowledge about the case than the judge who made the decision.
If a judge correctly interprets an immoral law, does that make the law alright? Stop begging the question. I'm arguing what's right, not what's legal.
Not the same at all. There are millions of other books to choose from because Rowling's does own all the printing presses.
It is the same. Re-read my post. I said a monopoly on Harry Potter, not a monopoly on books.
Citation needed. What theoretical "business-class" SLA are you holding Google to, and can you demonstrate that they haven't met it? Doing some hand waving about two or three outages this year, without quantifying how long they were, or what percentage of users were affected, is insufficient.
If unusually high availability of e-mail/documents is truly that important, if the brief unavailability of these services would bring justice to its knees, then I might question any decision not to invest in a hyper-available infrastructure. Simply not moving to Google Apps wouldn't be enough, in this case. I would expect the government to construct their own infrastructure with multiple levels of redundancy and code diversity, redundant networks and power systems. Obviously, they aren't going to do that. I strongly suspect (but, I admit, don't know for sure) that the city is choosing between managing a "standard" business-class infrastructure, and Google. If you're truly asserting that Google Apps does a poorer job than a typical business setup, I'd appreciate seeing some actual numbers to back up your assertion.
With the advancement of Google and open-source software,
Oh yes, Google and Open Source Software... the kind of Open Source Software that's so secret they won't release the source code to.
... and then they built the supercollider.
OK, Mr. Smart-Ass, when Microsoft comes to you and says "You can't ship Linux on your computers unless you agree that 99% of your computers have Windows installed, regardless of what your customers ask for", and you say "No! I will not agree to that!", how many computers will you sell when you can't sell Windows. That's anti-competitive behavior, and Microsoft is guilty as hell.
I'm not from the LA IT department but I will say that I think the real feelings of the people making the decisions in the large organizations (business types, not necessarily IT types) are making those decisions based on cost analysis. Hosted/cloud services meet their needs and shift expenses from capital expenditures to operating expenditures (which is really important, smaller regular cost can be substantially better than large upfront cost from a financial perspective, even if the regular operating cost will add up to more than the capital expense given enough time). Not to mention it probably permits significant reductions in IT staffing, which is also very expensive. In the end, if it meets the requirements and it's cheaper it makes sense to do it. Certainly there is a cost associated with diminished reliability, but that's just another variable in the equation in determining which is more financially sound. For most slashdotters this is probably not good news as the story of cloud computing is about increasing productivity while maintaining or reducing IT expenditures over time, not growing them.
[citation needed]
Sorry about the babble, I've been getting used to writing that way. I agree that it's a business process revolution rather than a technical one, but I disagree that timescale is the whole story. I think the real meat on this one is in the economies of scale that can be enjoyed by the cloud services provider. This is also more of a hosted application situation than a flexible scaling situation, but the flexible scaling is important as it translates into significantly greater efficiency on the part of the provider. It reduces the need to purchase hardware and maintain data-centers as well as the need for workers to maintain those systems; and it should translate into a significantly lower cost per user than more traditional approaches (for all of these reasons and also obviously the scale benefits enjoyed by the provider which are very significant).
"If I understood this right, Microsoft was found guilty of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain monopolies in other sectors"
MS wasn't "found guilty" of anything because it was a civil -- ah forget it.
Sorry if I didn't use the proper legal expression. I'm sure everyone understood.
So, what are these "other sectors" that MS now enjoys a monopoly in?
At the time they were found "guilty" of leveraging their monopoly in the operating system market to gain market shares in the browser market. Microsoft had essentially managed to gain a monopoly in the browser market. They could not have gained that monopoly without illegally leveraging off their monopoly in the OS market.
The fact that they no longer have a monopoly in the browser market is an indication that the ruling had the intended effect.
So Google has a few thousand customers - most of whom are also using Microsoft Office - and Microsoft is dead? Ok then...
Given your political views, I can only suggest you emigrate to Somalia. In that paradise, there is no central government controlling the market, and people are make any associations they want, No society will take your rights away.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Cloud Computing" is just web based thin client with the servers outsourced to a 3rd party who you then trust to run their services scalably. The reason it hasn't been done before is simply that it's batshit insane and before you added marketing hype you'd lose your job even suggesting something as asinine. You simply don't put your day to day operations at the mercy of yet another 3rd party (and unlike basic utilities these services aren't simple and service levels are a bear to negotiate).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"At the time they were found "guilty" of leveraging their monopoly in the operating system market to gain market shares in the browser market."
Well, the US courts' position on IE is a bit muddled. In an earlier case Judge Jackson's ruling about MS bundling IE with Windows was overturned on appeal.
The penalty was overruled but not the finding of facts. There's no question that Microsoft was found "guilty" of using their monopoly in the OS sector to gain a monopoly in the browser market.
"The fact that they no longer have a monopoly in the browser market is an indication that the ruling had the intended effect."
I don't see how. Has MS eliminated IE from Windows? Has it been including firefox?
Maybe you don't remember about Microsoft preventing retailers from supplying Netscape with Windows and making changes to the OS that would break other applications? Do you not remember the Microsoft-only OS calls that IE would use which would make it perform faster?
The fact that they no longer use these practices is an indication that the judgment had some impact.