you asked for examples of goog privacy violations. there you go. my safari was set (by me) for a specific privacy setting, but goog exploited HTML hacks to get around this setting.
Can you explain in more detail what exactly Google did?
That's why you encryption-module-style seal the drive and connector cable, in which the breaking of the drive causes a battery/electromagnet to degauss the drive.
First, good luck degaussing the drive. With the high coercivity of modern drives you'd need a heck of a magnet.
Second, they might not figure it out beforehand, but they'd definitely figure it out after the fact. Unless you could convince a judge that your countermeasures weren't intended specifically to destroy evidence of your crimes, I think you'd still be going to jail for destruction of evidence.
Except in the real world you'll need to modify some of the code that operates on the data structure when you change it anyway
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You can't know that up front. Maybe you later find that some other piece of code that operates on the structure needs to insert elements near the beginning, and it's big enough and happens enough that the cost matters. So you swap it out for a list, or a deque. Or maybe it becomes more convenient to manage the data on disk, and you replace the vector with a custom disk-based vector class, or maybe an mmap'd flat array with a trivial wrapper (about all you have to implement is begin() and end() and have them return raw pointers).
it's better to just hammer out a quick "for int i = 0; i thing.size(); i++" than dick around with iterator and const_iterator vs. const iterator and so forth
Being able to use const iterators is another advantage, not a cost. It helps you -- and more importantly whoever comes after you -- to know at a glance that the loop doesn't modify the contents. It's compiler-enforced documentation. Even when I'm using raw arrays (rare, but it happens), I still use constant pointers and iterator notation just for that purpose. E.g.:
for (const int* iter = array; iter
I mean who says you'll even be changing the structure anyway? Why are you spending time now on something that probably won't even happen?
Why would you think it takes any more time to do it right than to hack it with an int index? As another poster commented, with the new loop syntax and auto, it's actually less typing to use the iterator, but even if it's not, clarity of expression, future-proofing and defense against inadvertent errors are far more important than the time it takes to type a few extra characters. If your typing speed is limiting your coding output, it's not because you type too slowly, it's because your code is poorly written.
auto means I no longer have to type std vector iterator in every for loop
You didn't anyway. You type in "int" to loop over a vector.
Only if you want to tie yourself to using a vector. Using a proper iterator costs you nothing in code space or execution time (because for a vector it optimizes down to just pointer arithmetic anyway), but means that at some future time you can replace that vector with a different data structure without having to modify the code that operates on it.
I suspect that "copying for the purpose of gathering evidence" would fall under Fair Use.;)
I suspect that if you tried to take the police to court for copyright infringement your suit would be tossed in summary judgement and the judge wouldn't even bother ruling on any question of Fair Use. He'd just say "this is ridiculous".
The evaluations take this into consideration. They primarily measure the change of the students over the year, relative to other teachers, the idea being that the teacher that can "teach" the most will show, and that shows even if the child is still under grade level at the end of the year.
Assuming there is a reasonably good way to measure student performance, that approach should work very well, particularly at the junior high and high school levels, where you not only have a large sample of students for each teacher (usually around 150), but you can also calibrate it by looking each student's improvement with each of their teachers. In elementary school the sample size for each teacher is smaller, but still reasonable, and over the course of a few years trends should become very apparent.
All assuming there's a good way to measure student performance. The biggest danger I see here is that it may lead to teaching for the test. How bad that is will depend on the quality of the tests.
First, you can't do it, because standard procedure in cases like this is to duplicate the drive contents and do all analysis on the duplicate. If your system destroyed the data when a "duress" password is entered, it would only be destroying a copy.
Yes but then they are in violation of Copyright...
Is there an encryption system available where if you put in a specifically bad password it damages the data forever?
It doesn't matter, for two reasons.
First, you can't do it, because standard procedure in cases like this is to duplicate the drive contents and do all analysis on the duplicate. If your system destroyed the data when a "duress" password is entered, it would only be destroying a copy.
Second, if you could do it you still probably wouldn't want to, because then you'd be prosecuted for destruction of evidence. I suppose if the penalty for destroying evidence is much lower than the penalty for the crime the contents of the drive would prove, that might be a good idea. But it still seems like you'd be better off just not saying anything.
That is called a Siesta, and civilized cultures have been doing it for thousands of years. and early afternoon nap typically after lunch or a couple hours after lunch works wonders.
If you read the segmented sleep links, they're not talking about siestas. The notion under discussion here is breaking your nighttime sleep into two portions. Going to bed when it gets dark, sleeping for a few hours, waking naturally for an hour or two, then sleeping a few more hours until morning.
It occurs to me, though, that this broken sleep pattern would be very natural during the winter in northern (or southern) latitudes, when sleeping the entire time the sun is down would be too long, and that siestas might be a variation of the pattern for northern/southern summers, or year-round in equatorial regions.
if their shadow-profiling is any indication of 'how its done' then you can expect google to start silently tracking the same inferential data about you as a person instead
If you're using Chrome, install the "keep my opt outs" extension. It'll make sure that the "do not track me" cookie is always set, so none of your searches or other information will be logged.
If you don't see how the __REALITY__ of extracting words from contents of your email/search terms/results/youtube/etc and building a profile about everything you do into one database versus __POSSIBILITY__ of some rogue ISP spying on some random email is different you are fucking nuts.
I think there's a huge difference: The only thing Google is going to do with the data is to pick relevant ads for me and improve my search results. I have absolutely no idea what some ISP -- or some random employee at some ISP -- will do. Of course, there's always the possibility of a rogue Google employee exploiting the data in some way, too, but I don't worry much about that, because I know how that stuff is controlled and secured. Obviously, I can't give details, and obviously you have no reason to take my word for it, so I don't expect you to agree.
The bigger concern about Google's database, IMO, is the potential for government abuse. But that exists nearly as much at the ISP, e.g. Carnivore.
Google's policy is to never sell your data. OFCOURCE you moron, they want to have the keys to the kingdom
Yes, that is the case. Google is convinced it can use the data more effectively than anyone else. And although you'll scoff, Google also believes it will behave more responsibly with the data than anyone else would either. For both reasons, Google doesn't sell your data.
Google's policy commits to never selling your data
They transform your data into their demographics and sell that to advertisers.
Aggregated, non personally-identifiable information, only. For example, Google Zeitgeist. I don't think Google sells even aggregated data to advertisers much, if at all, though. The privacy policy allows it, but my impression is that Google doesn't believe advertisers know how to use data as effectively as Google does anyway. Google would rather sell clicks to advertisers and use the data itself to maximize the number of clicks.
However, that still has a workflow where you edit my file directly, and diffs are tracked by revisions. Is there anyway to make it so that I have to accept/reject changes, or where changes are managed on a change-by-change basis?
No, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. Docs really is in its infancy in many ways. It's really interesting to me that it works as well as it does in spite of how much it's obviously missing. Just goes to show the how much more important it is to hit the right feature set, rather than a complete feature set. Still, there's a lot of filling out that's needed.
As for passing copies of files around, I think it's a fine workaround to put a doc on a file share, in sharepoint, or in source control. Google Docs is actually way better for simultaneous collaboration though, I have to agree with that.
Source control works well, as long as everyone involved will use it. I don't know about sharepoint; never used it. As for a file share... no. Every time I've tried that with more than a handful of people who are all careful to coordinate, it's resulted in a mess. I'd rather everyone e-mail copies with change tracking turned on, and have one person responsible for merging.
For what it's worth, Sharepoint / Office 2010 offers... some... simultaneous document editing. It's pretty limited and isn't nearly as responsive as Google Docs, but it looks like MS has at least been trying.
Thanks for the information. I'm sure eventually everyone will provide collaborative editing. It's just too useful to ignore. What will be interesting is to see how the F/LOSS world handles it.
So you'd be fine if I scanned all your personal documents and stored on them on my computer.
Unless you run your own mail server, your ISP stores all of your e-mails on their computers. If you do run your own mail server, all of your e-mail transits dozens of machines, and all in cleartext (unless you encrypt -- which no one does). Any of those machines can grab a copy -- and you don't even know who they are and have no privacy commitments from any of them.
I'll just take out the pieces I think someone might want and sell them separately.
Your ISP could be doing that, unless their privacy policy says they don't. Google's policy commits to never selling your data. You may choose not to believe Google, of course, but there certainly isn't any evidence that Google ever has sold your data.
Last I checked the spell checker didn't send the data off to Microsoft when it checked my spelling. If it ever did they would lose all their corporate customers because the use of it would violate privacy laws in many countries.
So, Office 365 is unsellable to corporate customers in said countries? It's also a cloud solution. I think the reality is more nuanced than what you're implying. Google Apps is sold to enterprises around the world, too. I think some of the potential sales run into trouble with laws that state that companies can't ship certain documents out of the country of origin. I suspect that may motivate Google, Microsoft and others to install data centers in those countries, but I don't think it'll completely eliminate enterprise use of cloud services.
The reason that Microsoft is scared of Google is that they are actively attempting to make the underlying system immaterial as the Google services become the compatibility glue.
Who cares if the underlying system is running Windows, OSX, Linux or something else when the end user gets exactly the same experience?
This.
Microsoft can compete with Apple, because the two companies use roughly the same model. Apple prefers to sell hardware and more or less give the software away, while Microsoft sells the software, but it's basically the same deal to consumers. Even more important, both companies build their business around the lock-in game, making consumers pick between the two ecosystems and to buy (with $) into one or the other. The friction provided by lock-in means that neither has to worry about being out-innovated in the short term. They may have ups and downs, but the billions will keep flowing. It's a comfortable playing field, and one that Microsoft has long proven they can dominate.
But Google wants to change the game entirely by making the operating system irrelevant. You can argue about whether or not Google's services have their own form of lock-in and change-resisting friction, but the main point is that Google's approach makes the hardware and software platform of the end-user's device irrelevant. Google wants the web to become a powerful but standardized application platform so that lock-ins at the level of the CPU, operating system, or even the browser go away, and everyone has to compete at the application level. That game is not one in which Microsoft will have many of their traditional advantages.
Personally, I think Microsoft still has huge advantages in a web-platform world. Microsoft employs a lot of really smart people and has huge cash reserves. Microsoft also has a pretty good start on building out the massive infrastructure needed to compete on "web scale". So I think MS has plenty of chances to continue making a lot of money even if Google "wins" and OS becomes irrelevant, but they'll have to work harder for it than they're accustomed to doing.
Google has an unknown track record with office applications, their products lack features compared to the competition
This is true... but the competition also lacks the collaboration features of Docs. Which is more important to you will vary, of course.
and they have a track record of starting projects and abandoning them without much warning
I think this is overstated. Google has definitely abandoned a large number of projects that never achieved significant usage, but have they ever abandoned something with millions of active users like Docs? Even more, have they ever abandoned a product that they actively and profitably sell to thousands of enterprise customers? That they could is clear. But avoiding the product isn't the only way to mitigate that risk. You can also lock them up contractually, requiring them to guarantee a certain level of service for a certain period of time, and even to guarantee that you will be able to export your documents to other common formats (e.g. ODF) should Google ever shut the service down. And if Google won't sign up to the required contractual guarantees, well, that answers that question.
What is a more legitimate concern, IMO, is whether or not companies should trust Google to store all of their proprietary data, to properly secure it against not just outside attacks but also against possible industrial espionage that could potentially be performed by Google employees. Those issues are harder to mitigate contractually.
That's true. The MS alternatives suck, but let's not be blind to the problems that google has. Plus we already have good alternatives. It's called FOSS.
I'm a fan of F/LOSS, but there really isn't a F/LOSS alternative to Docs. What I mean is that while LibreOffice, for example, does a bunch of things that Docs doesn't do, Docs also does some really compelling things that LibreOffice et al don't do. Specifically, Docs is a really powerful collaboration tool. I work for Google, so I've obviously been forced to use Docs extensively, for all of my design docs, presentations, etc. I briefly found Docs' limitations annoying, but the first time I sent a design doc out for review and saw the power of the collaboration model, I knew I'd never go back.
Unless you've tried it, it's hard to understand just how powerful it is to be able to have multiple people all working on a document in real time. Even if you don't need real-time collaboration, it's much better to have everyone commenting on and tweaking the same copy of the document, rather than sending copies around and then having someone try to pull all of the disparate changes together. And when that can happen in real-time, and you have either text chat or even full multi-party video conferencing (Google Hangouts) integrated into the collaborative document system... it's an amazingly effective way to get multiple detailed opinions and quickly arrive at consensus decisions, even when people are scattered around the world.
My kids' school uses Google Apps, including Docs (no, I had nothing to do with that decision; they made it before I joined Google and before I moved here) and I love it for that as well. My kids share their papers with me and I fix minor errors (and later go over the changes with them -- the markup on the revision view makes that easy), or add comments about more significant things I think they can improve, then later I see what they changed. My wife does the same. Sometimes all this happens more or less in real-time, while we're talking about it. Other times, due to schedule mismatches, the automatically-generated e-mails about comments and responses drive the process. It works well either way, though I prefer the interaction.
Of course, when the assignment is complete, turning it in is as simple as sharing the doc with the teacher, and the teacher's comments and corrections show up in the same way, via the same process. It's very powerful.
My wife often writes letters to various entities, and while she has good ideas she doesn't always structure them well, and her grammar, punctuation and spelling sometimes leave something to be desired. So, she writes her letters and shares them with me, and I fix them up. Sometimes I also significantly change the content. Usually she agrees, but not always, and she can always see exactly what I did and easily revert what she doesn't like. Often, we do these steps in parallel, with her still writing the end of the letter while I'm fixing up the beginning. Sometimes I'm even working right behind her, fixing up just a few words behind her.
Perhaps it's just my life, but about the only "documents" I write which aren't collaborative in at least some degree are slashdot posts and the like, so I find that I'd nearly always rather use Docs than anything else. Even if the feature set is rather anemic compared to a "real" office suite (though getting less so all the time).
Google claims my web history is "paused". Which probably means they will "unpause" it silently at some future time.
Because Google has a long history of silently changing your privacy settings? Just like they quietly updated their privacy policy, without telling anyone?
NextBus has been providing real-time bus data for years, and doing it better than Google. NextBus did all the hard work to make this work - they developed the position-reporting boxes that go on buses over a decade ago, got transit systems to adopt their technology, and developed a prediction system that figures out when the next bus will show up, based on live data and history. They even put signs in bus shelters that tell when the next bus will arrive.
NextBus and Google Transit are different, and orthogonal.
Google Transit tells you how to use to the transit system to get where you're going, based on published schedules.
NextBus assumes you know how to get where you're going, but tells you when the bus is actually going to arrive.
The services clearly have great potential synergy. If Google Transit could plan near-future routes based on actual bus position, and traffic forecasting, it could be much more useful.
As others have said, though, I think the biggest immediate way to improve Google Transit would be to provide multi-modal routing. Google Transit currently refuses to provide routes for me in several situations, because it assumes I'm not willing to walk as far as I am, and doesn't consider the possibilities of driving or biking for a portion of the trip. Granted that multi-modal is non-trivial -- it would need to know where parking is available and which buses/trains accommodate bicycles -- but it could be done and would be very useful. Transit also needs to integrate cost information and factor that into route calculations, and to do that properly it will also have to know about passes and whether or not you have one.
Someday it'd be really cool if it could also include air travel (Google has flight data now, with http://google.com/flights) and taxis and rental cars as well, for long trips. When planning a business trip I'd love to give Google Maps my home address and my hotel address and then have it find me a set of routes between them, complete with cost and time information and the ability to choose which factors to optimize.
Based on that between 1 and 2 extra people would make the car cheaper and fill a car with 4 people and the car will always come out cheaper.... which I think is a great shame, I always said that if they want to encourage public transport they need to find a way to make it cheap for groups.
Perhaps, but either way you've reduced the number of single-occupant vehicles on the road.
Slashdot Mirror
you asked for examples of goog privacy violations. there you go. my safari was set (by me) for a specific privacy setting, but goog exploited HTML hacks to get around this setting.
Can you explain in more detail what exactly Google did?
they hacked my safari to steal my data against my explicit decisions for them not to do so.
Google "hacked" Safari? I'm intrigued. Please explain.
That's why you encryption-module-style seal the drive and connector cable, in which the breaking of the drive causes a battery/electromagnet to degauss the drive.
First, good luck degaussing the drive. With the high coercivity of modern drives you'd need a heck of a magnet.
Second, they might not figure it out beforehand, but they'd definitely figure it out after the fact. Unless you could convince a judge that your countermeasures weren't intended specifically to destroy evidence of your crimes, I think you'd still be going to jail for destruction of evidence.
Doh!
The code snippet should have been:
for (const int* iter = array; iter < array + array_size; ++iter) { /* ... */
}
Except in the real world you'll need to modify some of the code that operates on the data structure when you change it anyway
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You can't know that up front. Maybe you later find that some other piece of code that operates on the structure needs to insert elements near the beginning, and it's big enough and happens enough that the cost matters. So you swap it out for a list, or a deque. Or maybe it becomes more convenient to manage the data on disk, and you replace the vector with a custom disk-based vector class, or maybe an mmap'd flat array with a trivial wrapper (about all you have to implement is begin() and end() and have them return raw pointers).
it's better to just hammer out a quick "for int i = 0; i thing.size(); i++" than dick around with iterator and const_iterator vs. const iterator and so forth
Being able to use const iterators is another advantage, not a cost. It helps you -- and more importantly whoever comes after you -- to know at a glance that the loop doesn't modify the contents. It's compiler-enforced documentation. Even when I'm using raw arrays (rare, but it happens), I still use constant pointers and iterator notation just for that purpose. E.g.: for (const int* iter = array; iter
I mean who says you'll even be changing the structure anyway? Why are you spending time now on something that probably won't even happen?
Why would you think it takes any more time to do it right than to hack it with an int index? As another poster commented, with the new loop syntax and auto, it's actually less typing to use the iterator, but even if it's not, clarity of expression, future-proofing and defense against inadvertent errors are far more important than the time it takes to type a few extra characters. If your typing speed is limiting your coding output, it's not because you type too slowly, it's because your code is poorly written.
You didn't anyway. You type in "int" to loop over a vector.
Only if you want to tie yourself to using a vector. Using a proper iterator costs you nothing in code space or execution time (because for a vector it optimizes down to just pointer arithmetic anyway), but means that at some future time you can replace that vector with a different data structure without having to modify the code that operates on it.
I suspect that "copying for the purpose of gathering evidence" would fall under Fair Use. ;)
I suspect that if you tried to take the police to court for copyright infringement your suit would be tossed in summary judgement and the judge wouldn't even bother ruling on any question of Fair Use. He'd just say "this is ridiculous".
I don't think I disagreed with any of what you said.
The evaluations take this into consideration. They primarily measure the change of the students over the year, relative to other teachers, the idea being that the teacher that can "teach" the most will show, and that shows even if the child is still under grade level at the end of the year.
Assuming there is a reasonably good way to measure student performance, that approach should work very well, particularly at the junior high and high school levels, where you not only have a large sample of students for each teacher (usually around 150), but you can also calibrate it by looking each student's improvement with each of their teachers. In elementary school the sample size for each teacher is smaller, but still reasonable, and over the course of a few years trends should become very apparent.
All assuming there's a good way to measure student performance. The biggest danger I see here is that it may lead to teaching for the test. How bad that is will depend on the quality of the tests.
First, you can't do it, because standard procedure in cases like this is to duplicate the drive contents and do all analysis on the duplicate. If your system destroyed the data when a "duress" password is entered, it would only be destroying a copy.
Yes but then they are in violation of Copyright...
Good luck with that argument.
Is there an encryption system available where if you put in a specifically bad password it damages the data forever?
It doesn't matter, for two reasons.
First, you can't do it, because standard procedure in cases like this is to duplicate the drive contents and do all analysis on the duplicate. If your system destroyed the data when a "duress" password is entered, it would only be destroying a copy.
Second, if you could do it you still probably wouldn't want to, because then you'd be prosecuted for destruction of evidence. I suppose if the penalty for destroying evidence is much lower than the penalty for the crime the contents of the drive would prove, that might be a good idea. But it still seems like you'd be better off just not saying anything.
That is called a Siesta, and civilized cultures have been doing it for thousands of years. and early afternoon nap typically after lunch or a couple hours after lunch works wonders.
If you read the segmented sleep links, they're not talking about siestas. The notion under discussion here is breaking your nighttime sleep into two portions. Going to bed when it gets dark, sleeping for a few hours, waking naturally for an hour or two, then sleeping a few more hours until morning.
It occurs to me, though, that this broken sleep pattern would be very natural during the winter in northern (or southern) latitudes, when sleeping the entire time the sun is down would be too long, and that siestas might be a variation of the pattern for northern/southern summers, or year-round in equatorial regions.
5+ Great Ad for Google, by Google.
Just telling it like I see it, and I make no attempt to conceal the fact that I work for Google.
if their shadow-profiling is any indication of 'how its done' then you can expect google to start silently tracking the same inferential data about you as a person instead
If you're using Chrome, install the "keep my opt outs" extension. It'll make sure that the "do not track me" cookie is always set, so none of your searches or other information will be logged.
If you don't see how the __REALITY__ of extracting words from contents of your email/search terms/results/youtube/etc and building a profile about everything you do into one database versus __POSSIBILITY__ of some rogue ISP spying on some random email is different you are fucking nuts.
I think there's a huge difference: The only thing Google is going to do with the data is to pick relevant ads for me and improve my search results. I have absolutely no idea what some ISP -- or some random employee at some ISP -- will do. Of course, there's always the possibility of a rogue Google employee exploiting the data in some way, too, but I don't worry much about that, because I know how that stuff is controlled and secured. Obviously, I can't give details, and obviously you have no reason to take my word for it, so I don't expect you to agree.
The bigger concern about Google's database, IMO, is the potential for government abuse. But that exists nearly as much at the ISP, e.g. Carnivore.
Google's policy is to never sell your data. OFCOURCE you moron, they want to have the keys to the kingdom
Yes, that is the case. Google is convinced it can use the data more effectively than anyone else. And although you'll scoff, Google also believes it will behave more responsibly with the data than anyone else would either. For both reasons, Google doesn't sell your data.
Google's policy commits to never selling your data
They transform your data into their demographics and sell that to advertisers.
Aggregated, non personally-identifiable information, only. For example, Google Zeitgeist. I don't think Google sells even aggregated data to advertisers much, if at all, though. The privacy policy allows it, but my impression is that Google doesn't believe advertisers know how to use data as effectively as Google does anyway. Google would rather sell clicks to advertisers and use the data itself to maximize the number of clicks.
However, that still has a workflow where you edit my file directly, and diffs are tracked by revisions. Is there anyway to make it so that I have to accept/reject changes, or where changes are managed on a change-by-change basis?
No, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. Docs really is in its infancy in many ways. It's really interesting to me that it works as well as it does in spite of how much it's obviously missing. Just goes to show the how much more important it is to hit the right feature set, rather than a complete feature set. Still, there's a lot of filling out that's needed.
As for passing copies of files around, I think it's a fine workaround to put a doc on a file share, in sharepoint, or in source control. Google Docs is actually way better for simultaneous collaboration though, I have to agree with that.
Source control works well, as long as everyone involved will use it. I don't know about sharepoint; never used it. As for a file share... no. Every time I've tried that with more than a handful of people who are all careful to coordinate, it's resulted in a mess. I'd rather everyone e-mail copies with change tracking turned on, and have one person responsible for merging.
For what it's worth, Sharepoint / Office 2010 offers... some... simultaneous document editing. It's pretty limited and isn't nearly as responsive as Google Docs, but it looks like MS has at least been trying.
Thanks for the information. I'm sure eventually everyone will provide collaborative editing. It's just too useful to ignore. What will be interesting is to see how the F/LOSS world handles it.
So you'd be fine if I scanned all your personal documents and stored on them on my computer.
Unless you run your own mail server, your ISP stores all of your e-mails on their computers. If you do run your own mail server, all of your e-mail transits dozens of machines, and all in cleartext (unless you encrypt -- which no one does). Any of those machines can grab a copy -- and you don't even know who they are and have no privacy commitments from any of them.
I'll just take out the pieces I think someone might want and sell them separately.
Your ISP could be doing that, unless their privacy policy says they don't. Google's policy commits to never selling your data. You may choose not to believe Google, of course, but there certainly isn't any evidence that Google ever has sold your data.
Last I checked the spell checker didn't send the data off to Microsoft when it checked my spelling. If it ever did they would lose all their corporate customers because the use of it would violate privacy laws in many countries.
So, Office 365 is unsellable to corporate customers in said countries? It's also a cloud solution. I think the reality is more nuanced than what you're implying. Google Apps is sold to enterprises around the world, too. I think some of the potential sales run into trouble with laws that state that companies can't ship certain documents out of the country of origin. I suspect that may motivate Google, Microsoft and others to install data centers in those countries, but I don't think it'll completely eliminate enterprise use of cloud services.
The reason that Microsoft is scared of Google is that they are actively attempting to make the underlying system immaterial as the Google services become the compatibility glue. Who cares if the underlying system is running Windows, OSX, Linux or something else when the end user gets exactly the same experience?
This.
Microsoft can compete with Apple, because the two companies use roughly the same model. Apple prefers to sell hardware and more or less give the software away, while Microsoft sells the software, but it's basically the same deal to consumers. Even more important, both companies build their business around the lock-in game, making consumers pick between the two ecosystems and to buy (with $) into one or the other. The friction provided by lock-in means that neither has to worry about being out-innovated in the short term. They may have ups and downs, but the billions will keep flowing. It's a comfortable playing field, and one that Microsoft has long proven they can dominate.
But Google wants to change the game entirely by making the operating system irrelevant. You can argue about whether or not Google's services have their own form of lock-in and change-resisting friction, but the main point is that Google's approach makes the hardware and software platform of the end-user's device irrelevant. Google wants the web to become a powerful but standardized application platform so that lock-ins at the level of the CPU, operating system, or even the browser go away, and everyone has to compete at the application level. That game is not one in which Microsoft will have many of their traditional advantages.
Personally, I think Microsoft still has huge advantages in a web-platform world. Microsoft employs a lot of really smart people and has huge cash reserves. Microsoft also has a pretty good start on building out the massive infrastructure needed to compete on "web scale". So I think MS has plenty of chances to continue making a lot of money even if Google "wins" and OS becomes irrelevant, but they'll have to work harder for it than they're accustomed to doing.
Google has an unknown track record with office applications, their products lack features compared to the competition
This is true... but the competition also lacks the collaboration features of Docs. Which is more important to you will vary, of course.
and they have a track record of starting projects and abandoning them without much warning
I think this is overstated. Google has definitely abandoned a large number of projects that never achieved significant usage, but have they ever abandoned something with millions of active users like Docs? Even more, have they ever abandoned a product that they actively and profitably sell to thousands of enterprise customers? That they could is clear. But avoiding the product isn't the only way to mitigate that risk. You can also lock them up contractually, requiring them to guarantee a certain level of service for a certain period of time, and even to guarantee that you will be able to export your documents to other common formats (e.g. ODF) should Google ever shut the service down. And if Google won't sign up to the required contractual guarantees, well, that answers that question.
What is a more legitimate concern, IMO, is whether or not companies should trust Google to store all of their proprietary data, to properly secure it against not just outside attacks but also against possible industrial espionage that could potentially be performed by Google employees. Those issues are harder to mitigate contractually.
That's true. The MS alternatives suck, but let's not be blind to the problems that google has. Plus we already have good alternatives. It's called FOSS.
I'm a fan of F/LOSS, but there really isn't a F/LOSS alternative to Docs. What I mean is that while LibreOffice, for example, does a bunch of things that Docs doesn't do, Docs also does some really compelling things that LibreOffice et al don't do. Specifically, Docs is a really powerful collaboration tool. I work for Google, so I've obviously been forced to use Docs extensively, for all of my design docs, presentations, etc. I briefly found Docs' limitations annoying, but the first time I sent a design doc out for review and saw the power of the collaboration model, I knew I'd never go back.
Unless you've tried it, it's hard to understand just how powerful it is to be able to have multiple people all working on a document in real time. Even if you don't need real-time collaboration, it's much better to have everyone commenting on and tweaking the same copy of the document, rather than sending copies around and then having someone try to pull all of the disparate changes together. And when that can happen in real-time, and you have either text chat or even full multi-party video conferencing (Google Hangouts) integrated into the collaborative document system... it's an amazingly effective way to get multiple detailed opinions and quickly arrive at consensus decisions, even when people are scattered around the world.
My kids' school uses Google Apps, including Docs (no, I had nothing to do with that decision; they made it before I joined Google and before I moved here) and I love it for that as well. My kids share their papers with me and I fix minor errors (and later go over the changes with them -- the markup on the revision view makes that easy), or add comments about more significant things I think they can improve, then later I see what they changed. My wife does the same. Sometimes all this happens more or less in real-time, while we're talking about it. Other times, due to schedule mismatches, the automatically-generated e-mails about comments and responses drive the process. It works well either way, though I prefer the interaction.
Of course, when the assignment is complete, turning it in is as simple as sharing the doc with the teacher, and the teacher's comments and corrections show up in the same way, via the same process. It's very powerful.
My wife often writes letters to various entities, and while she has good ideas she doesn't always structure them well, and her grammar, punctuation and spelling sometimes leave something to be desired. So, she writes her letters and shares them with me, and I fix them up. Sometimes I also significantly change the content. Usually she agrees, but not always, and she can always see exactly what I did and easily revert what she doesn't like. Often, we do these steps in parallel, with her still writing the end of the letter while I'm fixing up the beginning. Sometimes I'm even working right behind her, fixing up just a few words behind her.
Perhaps it's just my life, but about the only "documents" I write which aren't collaborative in at least some degree are slashdot posts and the like, so I find that I'd nearly always rather use Docs than anything else. Even if the feature set is rather anemic compared to a "real" office suite (though getting less so all the time).
Google claims my web history is "paused". Which probably means they will "unpause" it silently at some future time.
Because Google has a long history of silently changing your privacy settings? Just like they quietly updated their privacy policy, without telling anyone?
NextBus has been providing real-time bus data for years, and doing it better than Google. NextBus did all the hard work to make this work - they developed the position-reporting boxes that go on buses over a decade ago, got transit systems to adopt their technology, and developed a prediction system that figures out when the next bus will show up, based on live data and history. They even put signs in bus shelters that tell when the next bus will arrive.
NextBus and Google Transit are different, and orthogonal.
Google Transit tells you how to use to the transit system to get where you're going, based on published schedules.
NextBus assumes you know how to get where you're going, but tells you when the bus is actually going to arrive.
The services clearly have great potential synergy. If Google Transit could plan near-future routes based on actual bus position, and traffic forecasting, it could be much more useful.
As others have said, though, I think the biggest immediate way to improve Google Transit would be to provide multi-modal routing. Google Transit currently refuses to provide routes for me in several situations, because it assumes I'm not willing to walk as far as I am, and doesn't consider the possibilities of driving or biking for a portion of the trip. Granted that multi-modal is non-trivial -- it would need to know where parking is available and which buses/trains accommodate bicycles -- but it could be done and would be very useful. Transit also needs to integrate cost information and factor that into route calculations, and to do that properly it will also have to know about passes and whether or not you have one.
Someday it'd be really cool if it could also include air travel (Google has flight data now, with http://google.com/flights) and taxis and rental cars as well, for long trips. When planning a business trip I'd love to give Google Maps my home address and my hotel address and then have it find me a set of routes between them, complete with cost and time information and the ability to choose which factors to optimize.
Based on that between 1 and 2 extra people would make the car cheaper and fill a car with 4 people and the car will always come out cheaper.... which I think is a great shame, I always said that if they want to encourage public transport they need to find a way to make it cheap for groups.
Perhaps, but either way you've reduced the number of single-occupant vehicles on the road.