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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."
I have a bridge to sell ya!
Wherever you go... There you are. B.B.
Don't know about Fortune 500 but if you look at:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/customers.html
you can filter by business type - and there are some well-known names there.
I can't say I'm surprised. The value for money versus any Microsoft product is night and day - you get more services for about a third the price. (The balance has started to tilt back; when I first said that the closest alternative was hosted Exchange from a major reseller, that's not the case any more).
Know what? I think Ballmer knows, somewhere in his wizened black little heart, that quite a few of Microsoft's products are not actually particularly good.
That's not been a huge problem in the past, mainly because the competition was frequently just as awful and even if it wasn't, their position in the market meant "nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" became the mantra for many IT directors of the late '90s-early '00s, just as "nobody got fired for buying IBM" was the mantra for their predecessors. Now we're finally starting to see some healthy competition opening up in parts of the industry where previously there was almost none, and my God it's a breath of fresh air.
Two issues at stake here:
1. Outsourcing is not new. Outsourcing of something which includes confidential information isn't that new either. If it wasn't, there would be no such thing as external companies providing HR advice, payroll services, there wouldn't be patent lawyers, independent accountants....
2. The great majority of businesses aren't Fortune 500 megacorps. They're small businesses - under 100 staff. They almost certainly outsource a number of services anyway - and they certainly don't have a CIO. This is the sort of business that Google Apps is absolutely made for - by the time you've bought a half-decent server, licensed something like Exchange and paid someone to come in and set it up for you, you could have bought Google Apps for your entire staff for four years. And you still won't have reliable webmail for anyone who's on the road, unless you want to buy a leased line or hosting in a data centre - which for the small company is an expense they can ill afford.
99.9% (0.999) is three nines, not one nine.
when your shit stinks, focus attention on someone else.
It's more than just that. There was a time when declarations like this from Microsoft would actually garner them more business and fulfill their "prophecies" of such. It seems some at Microsoft still think they have that pull, but reality says such efforts by them are largely far less effective than back in the 90's when it used to work. It's all part and parcel to their extravagant claims that they dont/wont cite figures for, and claims of things lacking on Google's end that have already existed for ages.
Nor does it seem he's got much of any idea what cloud computing is anyway... he compares it to their very botched acquisition of Hotmail in 1997 (err... 1998? Nope... 1997 guy!). I was there (UUNet*) when that acquisition completed. In some ways, their actions then were very much like these current ones. They were deep into extolling the virtues of Windows NT Server, started gaining some marketshare, and got lambasted for not using their own product for Hotmail (as well as being lambasted for all the engineers there who were still running OS/2). They switched Hotmail to Windows, with a massive increase in machines (hundredfold, if memory serves), and still had massive issues with their setup not scaling. Sadly, them extolling how much better they were than the competition, even in light of the reality of their own problems with their own platform handling such traffic, worked pretty well, and Windows Server continued to make inroads.
This is more of the same... claim the (very premature) death of a competitor, the "far better" features of your own product, talk about your competitor's privacy issues when they are willing (and have, numerous times) to sell your data to anyone who's a "Business Partner" and on and on. Nothing new... except this time (as with similar cases recently) it's not working the way it did in the past.
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*For those who don't know or didnt remember, "we" at UUNet actually provided much of the services for MSN... backbone, dialup, routing, and many others (and AOL for that matter... AlterDial was actually ours too). Some who remember that day and age may also remember that there were a few non-dedicated numbers (our overflow numbers) shared by UUNet, AOL and MSN... the logins would determine how we routed them and what service we presented. That's how a few "outsiders" started making the connection between it all.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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.