Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Ups Online War, Says Google's 'Failing'
CWmike writes "Raising the stakes in its war of words, Microsoft said on Tuesday that Google simply doesn't understand what businesses need, and is failing at pushing its way into the enterprise. In this edited version of his interview with Computerworld, Microsoft's senior director of Online Services, Tom Rizzo, talks about Google's privacy issues, scanning user data, the difference between consumer and corporate needs, and his doubts about Google surviving in the enterprise space. He also said he thinks Google will be shocked to see Microsoft's momentum into the enterprise cloud sector."
when your shit stinks, focus attention on someone else.
I have a bridge to sell ya!
Wherever you go... There you are. B.B.
Given the market share that Google has in contextual advertising, I tend to disagree with Microsoft's conclusion. Of course I could be wrong, but I highly doubt it.
right...
i know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees
"Number one, meet me in ten forward!"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
He also said he thinks Google will be shocked to see Microsoft's momentum into the enterprise cloud sector.
Maybe, but that's ignoring the already massive size of Google in "the cloud." The only thing better than being about to unleash a can of whoop-ass is to be currently whooping ass.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
What enterprise momentum in the cloud sector? What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously? Who? Backups...maybe? Personal photos and email? Of course. But, trade secrets? Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations? To the cloud? Really?
Really?
Google wants all my data. They make no effort at hiding that intent. But I do trust they aren't handing my data over. Microsoft has a specific patent on how to sell my private data, and has handed my private data over the government.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
When I want to know what the future trends of online services are, I know I can always count on Microsoft being the one to turn to when I want to know EXACTLY what will be next years abysmal laughingstock of failure will be.
I love how Bing maps only allows streetview to work in IE... how web2.0 of them
Right... because Bing has been so wildly successful?
Okay, that might have been uncalled for, but it felt really good.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Google hasn't gotten too far with offering corporate services, and I suspect they aren't that interested. It's one thing to provide a free email service that is based on ad revenue and data mining. But selling that and providing an SLA offering 99.999% up-time is a different market. You have to provide real support and respond to issues - Google has forums for reporting bugs but I can't call them and say "Hey, my gmail isn't working" and get an answer. I can't call them and report that an RSS feed isn't working or that a gadget is screwing up my iGoogle page. And rightfully so -- those services are free perks. If you don't like 'em, don't use 'em - but they are the best of the free options.
Another interesting example is Google's "desktop" search tools. Google Desktop has been around for a decade and I've seen 1 or 2 small businesses use it, but no one large and not seriously. It is more like something that some techie guy installs on his machine and that's it, which is too bad because it is something businesses really need.
The guy goes in and talks about how it is bad that Google dumped offline support. So... ...an internet company that was founded and ran off of the net makes you use the net for support. Who uses anything by Google and is not online? Who uses Google's enterprise solutions and is not online? Yes, Google takes my data. I am well aware of that. I have small websites that I have built that will take your data if you on onto them. Like Google, I do not sell my information that I have gathered.
I do know that Microsoft has Azure, but that is all I know about it outside of knowing it exists. I honestly know more about Amazon's could space than Microsoft's. I am no expert and probably not the best and most reliable source of information. I am just a straight up web developer. If a normal web developer like myself has not heard of the Microsoft solutions outside of the name itself but has heard alot about the competition, then I would see that as them being behind the rest of the market since us normal web developers have not heard much about it.
The world is how you make it
A: No, I'm super mega awesome and totally deserve more money!
See also the answer to "Hey, hooker, are you a really bad lay?"
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We get these stories a lot on /. What's the surprise here? One competitor is talking smack about another. This is what they do. They do it on a regular basis. Wake me up when, I don't know, when Apple admits that the Android might be a good product. Or when hell freezes over. You know, whichever you want to use for your timepiece.
Not everybody is dropping office for Google Docs.
Has anyone tried Office 365? Is it any good?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Google does not care about its Office products. It does not want any revenue from its cloud based office offerings. Google understood that as long as Microsoft is having a cash cow in the form of Microsoft Office, it will be able to out last any competitor. It can take losses in the billions, quarter after quarter and simply wait for the competitors to run out of money. Putting a crimp on the income stream of Ms-Office is the primary goal of Google. That it has achieved. No matter what, people are not going to pay the old norm prices for MS-Office.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If Microsoft understands the business better, then why has the Online Services division been in the red since 2006? Isn't this the same division that lost Microsoft another $33M in the last quarter alone?
I usually don't care about Microsoft either way, but listening to them spew this shit really makes me mad. Aside from an undeserved majority share with IE, how is Microsoft even relevant on the internet? This really reeks of desperation.
This is news? Really?
Enterprise, we need to increase momentum, we are entering the cloud sector now!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And, maybe Microsoft doesn't understand what consumers need.
Hearing Microsoft actually say this is reminiscent of the whole "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" commercials where the PC wants to do "fun stuff" like spreadsheets and pie charts.
This blind focus on what corporations need basically missed out on the existence of the consumer market. In a lot of ways, I think Apple has shown that going after the consumer market can be quite lucrative, since apparently nobody else is really focusing on that very well.
And, I've come to decide that anybody who cites a Gartner report is, by definition, talking out of their backside. Gartner says what companies pay them to say.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...and, in other news, North Korea broadcasts apology for shelling S. Koreans to death, say it was all a Korean April Fools Joke, and come on in! Check what's doin' in our Nuke research program! Gift baskets for all UN inspectors.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I don't much care what Microsoft has to say about anything. What I am curious about is how much Chrome OS will cut into Windows market share once it is finally launched. I don't want speculation -- wake me up when there are some solid numbers.
The tone of that ms dude in the interview annoyed me. I wonder if ms is going to shoot themselves in the foot by pushing cloud based services. They have ms office engrained in business because everyone uses it, and it works well enough to continue. But if they push people to use cloud office and it sucks some other company like google may swoop those customers away. The article talks about how people are used to having these softwares on their machine and I think that's a major reason for offices success, change that and you may uproot your own cusomters.
From the story: "He also said he thinks Google will be shocked to see Microsoft's momentum into the enterprise cloud sector."
Translation: "I wish I worked for a functional company that has a technically knowledgeable CEO."
ITS WHAT BUSINESS NEEDS!
That's a bit odd because we just switched our enterprise over to Google...
The consumer market is plenty big enough for Google to thrive and prosper.
What's really interesting is to note how consumer technology has been inviting itself into the enterprise space since the first personal computers. Are there any examples of technology moving in the opposite direction?
Microsoft has yet to learn that most of the planet doesn't deal with enterprises.
That's Microsoft's bailiwick and their undoing as well.
Microsoft will do as well with the desktops they helped enterprises change but they've been pinned there as effectively as Erie/Bucyrus was with their large earth movers, and unable to even see the threat from Case backhoes. Case is bigger than ever and Erie/Bucyrus is a company that operates in an extremely rarefied "project atmosphere."
Not every project needs huge expenditures, complex change control and multi-phase deployment.
Google is doing fine dealing with people and enterprises in other relationships and charging per connection.
Microsoft simply charges too much for equivalent (actually lesser,) service.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This definitely isn't for Google, because Google couldn't possibly care less about what Microsoft has to say about any of Google's plans for the enterprise.
This is more for the IT execs and managers of big corporations who couldn't tell a server from a doorstop: "Don't buy Google! They're unreliable! They're unsafe! They're full of FAIL!"
It's called Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, and they're masters at using it on stupid executives.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
And after they just gave me a pay raise. I was hoping to stick around to see if we get another phone this year. Is anyone from Microsoft accepting resumes?
Or, perhaps companies don't like having "solutions" forced on them.
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if any of my employees ever says, "To the cloud!" I will fire them on the spot. Fucking stupid commercials. Yes, the OS is so powerful, one has to offload processing elsewhere.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Please be clear, and when it comes to titles be not so lazy as to save yourself typing one character. Japanese amateur animators do that when they produce in English, let's not follow their lead.
Film at eleven.
Just read the article...
Basically the Microsoft guy is saying "don't use Google's cloud services, use Microsoft's cloud services" and attempting to justify that by saying "they don't know security but we do". However he fails to provide any evidence for his statements - his single example mentions Google's Street View, which a) is about privacy rather than security; and b) isn't related to their cloud services at all.
I believe Microsoft is doing a significantly better job with security overall than they did a few years ago. But, given their track record, I would think they'd be hesitant to play the security card - it could easily backfire.
#DeleteChrome
"shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously?" It's really no different than sticking your servers (especially if you lease or finance them) in any other third-party-managed data center. In either case, the company can tap network connections; steal the hard drives with our data; etc. The biggest difference between clouds and traditional data centers is really just that clouds tend to charge you hourly or daily or at longest monthly; while data centers like yearly, or at shortest daily contracts.
If Microsoft understands what businesses need they don't need to talk about it, they just need to do it.
_Talk_ by companies about how they understand what businesses need and their competition doesn't is a handy smokescreen to explain away problems with their product or their product line. "Yes, it looks to _you_ like a steaming pile, but you, you understand nothing. _You_ are not part of our target market. You understand nothing about what businesses want. We do, and I can assure you real businesses don't want sugar, they want steaming piles."
If Google is failing, Google is failing. Microsoft doesn't need to talk about it. All they need to do is let Google fail. I care whether Google fails or not, but why should I care what Tom Rizzo thinks? And why should anyone at Microsoft lift a finger to influence perception, if "Google is failing" is the reality?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I can't even sync my hotmail contact list, calendar or email with my phone... Google lets me do this ;).
pot kettle black
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
First, what is the "enterprise cloud sector?" Microsoft is just making up marketing terms now. Granted, marketing is it's game and core competency. Google doesn't need the enterprise. Yes, it'd be nice but there are far more humans on the planet than there are enterprise companies. I'm really getting tired of "the cloud." It's called the Internet. You can call your little piece of it "the cloud" but it's still the 'Net. IRC is the cloud. Email is the cloud. Making up a new name does nothing but troll for the ignorant. Unfortunately, that's where Microsoft got it's start so maybe this all makes sense.
Are losing half a billion a year, way to set an example!
and sell them on the "local cloud"
I prefer to call it "SMOG".
Systems Managing Overall Genericity
The majority of large corporations are still using XP and IE6.
Current share prices via MSN:
Microsoft - $25.26
Google - $555.71
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Some of my experiences using Google to run my business:
1. We use Google Docs for all documents. Recently, after an employee left the company we deleted his account. Every document that he shared with the company is still visible in the Docs list, but there is no way to open them. It returns an error. Posts on Google Docs help site have gotten 0 useful responses other than "documents shared with others should still be accessible". They are not. There is no tech support.
2. We use Google Voice. I had business cards printed and the web site changed to use our Google Voice number. After a few customers complained about my disconnected number, I started looking into it. Apparently certain numbers cannot call Google Voice. The entire 941 area code gets "This number is disconnected" when they try to call. Posts on Google Voice help site have gotten 0 helpful responses. There is no tech support.
3. We use Google Adwords to run ads. Recently an employee who was new to the system created a test campaign with up to $10,000 a day limit pointing to www.test.com. Little did he know that campaigns are created in a "Running" state. And, even if you don't authorize Google to extend you credit, they will. Luckily I noticed the problem after only 3000 damage. Google tech support was non-existent. Luckily their collections department was a little more accessible and gave us a 10% discount on our mistake, and closed the account. They also delisted an unrelated website from Google results.
4. We hosted an old web site in Google Page Creator. For months, when we logged into Google Page Creator a message appeared that said something like "Your pages will soon be automatically migrated to Google Sites". When Page Creator was shut down Google nicely migrated the site to garbage and deleted all record of it ever existing.
Hi,
True. Example: Email. Gmail is nice. The web interface is good, but when not using it (sometimes necessary in a corporate environment), it fails.
- Desktop usage: The Google SMTP server is horribly unreliable. "Temporary failure", esp. when sending attachments, on an almost daily basis.
- Mobile usage: The Android Gmail client is mostly good, but has some peculiarities which simply prevent usage in a corporate environment:
* You can't set the "From:" address. That works fine in the web interface, but in the Android client, your stuck to using an @gmail.com email address. Of course a no-go when you're sending mail from a company account
* Detection of phone numbers in emails is very bad, to the point of being unusable. So when you get an email from your secretary, "Please call (06151) 12345-589", you simply can't simply tap on the number and call it. Even worse, since some current Android phones don't allow pasting in the Dialer, you actually have to REMEMBR the number and dial manually. WTF? Even 3-year old Nokia phones performed that task perfectly.
bye,
Tillmann
http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/images/07-minister.jpg
The issue I see is that Google isn't "business" isn't exactly catering to high level enterprise anyway. There is no way either Google or Microsoft is going to convince someone as large as say EDS or Oracle to abandon whatever system they have today for Google Docs or whatever Microsoft is offering with "cloud computing". However Google Services do make a lot of sense for smaller businesses and individuals that don't have the IT or resource budgets to handle this themselves. This is where Microsoft is pricing themselves out of the market.
In the end, we are still bit off of having the big guys go "all cloud" so they are right that Google is failing but Microsoft isn't exactly winning either.
It's one thing to provide a free email service that is based on ad revenue and data mining.
Hey, guess what ? Google DOES HAVE a "Gmail for enterprise" solution., which DOES INCLUDE direct phone and e-mail support".
But well, thank you for playing. Please next time, check what you're saying before posting.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you want support beyond the forums you're supposed to sign up for a paid account. Did you?
On a story where it's neither possible to be interesting nor informative, how did seventeen comments (by my preference settings) make it to +5?
I Googled for "microsoft obnoxious shill" expecting Allchin to make the cut. Turns out he was elbowed out in grand style by James Plamondon. I missed that one at the time. After the financial meltdown, he inexplicably leaked on himself.
How to Get Your Platform Accepted as a Standard - Microsoft Style
Here's a Microsoft hater with some serious elbow grease:
Former Microsoft Shill Openly Confesses, Alleges Microsoft Still Does This
How Jim Allchin, Gartner and Enderle Lied to the Whole World
I read a piece by Allchin once that forever set my normalization basis for all things Microsoft. Dang, it's hard to divide by mucous.
What Microsoft says about momentum is true. Exchange == U.S.S. Bismarck.
From the bathroom wall of all knowledge:
Dorsetshire and Maori stopped to rescue survivors, but a U-boat alarm caused them to leave the scene after rescuing only 110 Bismarck sailors, abandoning the surviving crew in the water. The next morning U-74, which had heard sinking noises from a distance, and the German weather ship Sachsenwald picked up 5 survivors. 1,995 of the ship's crew of 2,200 died.
If Microsoft ever loses the Bismarck, they had better be prepared to rescue their own.
"What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment?"
They already do. You can save a ton of cash. Most data in large companies is now in India with some no name company anyway. Outsourcers own the servers, facility, and even the data. and not an Indian subsidiary of the original company. Need more proof? Look at www.salesforce.com? With SalesForce you can fire your whole IT except for a few techs to fix desktops. Everything is on the browser now and can be accessed through latops. No messy cds, installation, maintance, nor an expensive IT deparment. I find it troubling to be dependent on a single vendor on your data and not control it. However, the CPAs and accountants are now the CEO's and they do not care about this. Only short term cost cutting from cost centers like I.T.
It is the new norm. If CIO's and engineers become CEO then this will change but for now Wall Street likes the instant short term savings and cost cutting.
I think Microsoft though does not understand the needs of why to use a cloud. They just offer an API and not prebuilt applications that do not need to be managed anymore. It is the promise of just logging in and working not having to go through project managers and budget committees to get new features, develop software, and invest in infrastructure.
http://saveie6.com/
As Office 365 is still in beta, how is it that you claim it's being used in real corporate environments? Or, to put it another way, how many corporates rush out and dump their production environments into a beta system? I'd hazard the answer is close to if not actually zero.
...Google simply doesn't understand what businesses need
Cloud. It's got what businesses crave.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Nail, meet hammer's head. Informative, insightful, and concise.
Microsoft is singling Google out here because Google is #1 in phone sales. Microsoft is chasing after Fortune 1000 companies with this comment, with an subtext here of "their stuff isn't going to work with your back office." Which is classic FUD misinformation from The Collective.
Meanwhile, in Reality World, which everyone outside of Redmond lives in, Microsoft's Windows Phone launch is seriously disappointing the company. So someone in Microsoft sales perked up and said, "Well Android phones can't possibly work as well with Enterprise as ours," completely forgetting that Android phones and iPhones have been banned from the Microsoft campus for so long that nobody knows how well the new smartphones work in the enterprise.
So this just looks like an ad-hominem attack, rather than what it is really aimed at.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I work for Microsoft and I apologize for these lame ass executive comments. I am an engineer there and I know that everyone out there hates us and wants us to fail but I just want you guys to know that we try very hard every day to improve our products. A lot of engineers work 12 hours a day working really hard to delight our customers. Sure, we win some and lose some but comments like these usually come from folks who know and understand very little about software. Forgive us, our intention is really to be useful.
But you need to see the trend in the stock price as well as the current price.
Also, how many shares of stock are outstanding for each company?
Nasdaq is slightly more bullish for Google than it is for Microsoft.
I'm going off topic here, but I think it has to do with corporate culture. IBM is perhaps the founder of what we call 'Information Technology' and was already more than 50 years old when the present day Silicon Valley companies started up in the 70s. All the Silicon Valley companies have a strong cult of personality attached to their founder-CEOs (and even later ones). You cannot think of Microsoft without associating with Bill Gates, or Oracle -Larry Ellison, Sun - Scott Nealy, Apple - Steve Jobs, or until recently, HP - Carly Fiorina. In IBM's case, the brand is bigger than any individual CEO, in fact one doesn't immediately think of Thomas Watson Sr. either when talking of IBM. Can anyone quickly recall who headed the company when it made the mistake of letting Microsoft have the license to DOS instead of buying it out? (without looking up Wiki).
It is very rare for an IBM executive to make controversial statements in the tech media about other companies- unlike the people mentioned above, who have all been sources of great quotes at various times. Google is similar, in that it largely doesn't crow about its success (though CEO Eric Schmidt will forever be quoted for his views on online privacy).
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
We're big believers that not everyone has a high-speed Internet connection.
What enterprise, in search of cloud solutions, is still on dial-up? What enterprise period?
At my job, in terms of reliability, the ERP software is the most important (which is why it runs on Linux). Number two is internect access (read: mostly email, but also EDI). A far distant third is Office apps. To say that offline support is a big selling point because people don't have high-speed access is naive at worst and (more likely) a bad sales pitch at best.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Wait until Wikileaks shows up with a CIA/NSA - Microsoft cloud "omniscience" contract, for omnivorous maintenance and "inspection" of all the saps.
That's what IBM said about Microsoft as well, until it was too late.
Enterprises often are the last businesses to adopt new end-user technologies, or technologies that reduce staff requirements. You can figure out yourself why that might be...
The result for my business from this thread is to seriously consider corporate gmail. Had been thinking about it, but this article and the link here from jimicus settles it.
Outlook server and the client have been a disaster for our 6 person business. We get lots of emails and lots of attachments. Outlook uses flat file to manage the emails. With 5-10 gig for each of us, this doesn't work. Breaking up email folders into smaller folders is an ongoing pain. And worst of all search doesn't work. Outlooks native search doesn't function across multiple folders (even in Office 2010), Xobni is slow and a hog, and even google's search can't handle these huge flat files.
Disaster.
Thanks.
Hunger is the best sauce.