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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 know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees
By "it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees" you really mean "because bribing a government employee is harder than a corporate CIO," right?
Government agencies are looking to cut costs right now, given that their budgets are likely to be slashed in the coming years, and Google services are cheaper than rolling your own. Government IT workers are digging in their heels, both to preserve their jobs and to avoid having to be retrained, but the momentum these days in the public sector is going cheap, and that means Google.
For all the ranting about special interests and lobbying in the public sector, private companies have even less accountability. There is nothing preventing the MS sales rep from taking the company CIO on a complimentary golf game and getting an exclusive contract, even if Google or someone else could save the company millions.
Has anyone tried Office 365? Is it any good?
I've played around with it, and my impression is that it is indeed "pretty good," but not necessarily any better than Google Docs or an adequate replacement for the way people do things now.
One thing that bothered me that I don't think I was adequately able to articulate in the article is that it just doesn't feel as good to be doing all my work "in the cloud," i.e. over an Internet connection, as doing it the old-fashioned way. Sure, you can save a document directly to your SharePoint site from within Microsoft Word. But there's no kind of feedback that acknowledges "hey, I'm attempting to save this over the Internet, and anything could happen between here and the server, so sit tight and we'll try to make this work." Instead it just acts like it's the same thing as saving to your local drive, or even to a local server, which it's not. So every now and then I'd experience some unexplained delay and I'd find myself going to the SharePoint site and refreshing things in my browser to make sure everything worked right. And because I was using the same software I'd use to do things "the old-fashioned way," I kept asking myself, "Why do I have to do this on the stupid 'cloud'? Why can't I just save this to my drive and then copy my final draft to the server?" (Of course you can, but then using a "cloud solution" starts to have diminishing returns.)
I think the biggest advantage of Office 365, like BPOS before it, is not having to maintain your own Exchange server. SharePoint can be pretty useful too, but it seems to me that the learning curve required to get it into a form that your company can actually use productively is pretty high. And as far as using the Web-based versions of the Office apps, I I don't rate them very highly at all; they certainly aren't much better than Google Docs, unless you really, really need a way to view complex Office documents on the Web (as opposed to using Office).
Breakfast served all day!
Damn that sucks, but why would you EVER trust a third-party with the only copy of your data? Use the cloud for services, not critical data storage. If they don't make it easy to keep a local mirror, you need to find another solution. Hell, I keep copies of most everything I download, because I never know when the provider will go and remove it from their site.