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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."
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
"Fire at will!"
Just once, I wish Worf would have pulled out his phaser and shot at Riker.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
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.
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.
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!