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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?"
I thought "Microsoft Cash" was a new marvellous Redmond product I hadn't heard of.
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!
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
No. Someone's just getting a dedicated data center hosting scalable web apps. Nothing new.
Of all the places on the interwebs, I would hope /. could refrain from the marketing babble.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
It turns out that chronology makes the world a much more comprehensible place:
At times A through B, LA purchased software from Microsoft. At time C, which is after times A and B, they sued, asserting that Microsoft used their market power in the interval between A and B to overcharge. They one. At time D, which is after A, B, and C, they purchased a product from a competitor which was not offered in the A to B interval.
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.
Has cloud computing stepped up to prime time?
I hear "cloud computing" discussed and wonder what it really means. It seems like it's just a notion of a server connected to many clients serving data to client applications (which isn't a new concept). However, my impression was that "cloud computing" was many clients connected to each other serving each other content.
Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about it
Cloud computing services often provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.
Okay... cloud computing is "business application accessed from a web browser". Well, in the respect I think the deal might be a good step for cloud computing.
You neglect the effect of the close call that MS experienced that tempered, somewhat its proclivity for using the Mafia business model. Remember even under the W, supposedly MS was under judicial restraint. Those factors had to play a role in allowing competition to reappear*.
* However, if you look at the netbook experience where Linux suddenly vanished (supposedly completely) from its initial dominance one can see hints that MS is probably back to its old game, but the environment has altered in the interim.
In a word, no, Google mail is not ready for primetime. They are not able to meet the SLA's required for a business, especially government work where the email system needs to be readily available. I would assume there is some extent of document management involved here, and if that's the case what happens when gmail goes down? I know government tends to move slowly, but this could seriously interrupt procedures - what if cases weren't tried in due time? Businesses and government use email for more than just simple communication, it could also be a sign-off step in a procedure's workflow, and breaking that is often a big problem.
In 2009 Gmail was down in February and then in September, and I believe there was at least once more occurence this year as well. In 2008 Google was down in July, three times in August, and once in October. If I ran a business and my email was completely down to this extent I would fire my Exchange team.
Sure Google gives you 15 days free when the service is unavailable for a period of time, but that doesn't really help now does it?
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.
I run a small 200+ computer operation and had Google Enterprise call yesterday. We use their Postini service for spam and really like it. The sales rep on the line wanted to know if we were interested in their Apps product and had mentioned that Los Angeles recently switched to it. Call me traditional or old-fashioned, but I like having physical access to my data. I also like being responsible for ensuring our services stay up and running. If e-mail is down, I can fix it, instead of calling someone else to check it out for me. Several techs in our state from a recent meeting shared this sentiment as well. What is the general overall feeling from IT on "cloud computing"? I'd be curious the thoughts from the LA IT department...
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.
I love it, we finally will have open government. Just Google your local representatives name, and all the related email, documents, and maybe even web searches, will be there for users to browse. Transparency, accountability, and honesty. No more browsing on craigslist on taxpayers time. No more hiding behind the law.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
Ouch. I think that I didn't get my chronology quite right. I should have gone 1. Coffee 2. Slashdot rather than the other way around...
actually they did not make a superior product, go back and read all the findings. They did in fact use their position to destroy others before they could compete, which is fine, unless you have a monopoly.
A Smith & Wesson beats four aces -- Murphy's Law of Poker
[citation needed]
"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.
Is it just me or have other people been noticing posts inappropriately modded as funny? I don't really see why anyone would mod this post funny...he isn't really trying to be funny and he isn't ironically funny either.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Dear Microsoft:
Forget the fact that you overcharge
us, we can overlook that. You were
counting on your monopoly to
keep us as customers and that's not right.
Your products, however, are shoddy and
outside the realm of
usability. We will switch to Google.
Love,
California
So Google has a few thousand customers - most of whom are also using Microsoft Office - and Microsoft is dead? Ok then...
is the favourite sport of many /.ers !
Microsoft's executive offices just placed an order for replacement office furniture.
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.