would generally not recommend the product today to most businesses unless their needs were very minimal and/or cost was the overriding concern"
Then we are in agreement.
I only meant this insofar as your actual argument on/. goes, not that you are making an inappropriate decision for your environment.
But my position, as seen in the original post which you replied to, is that I am clearly referring to my own situation and the situation of the CTOs/CIOs I know. Not a generalist statement against Google apps.
In my experience and in the experience of many others, there is a high failure rate when actual restores are required -- particularly in smaller organizations that do not systematically test their backups
I can only go by my experiences in this area (not other CTOs/CIOs that I know) and state that we've have to restore from backups twice in the past 5 years and had absolutely zero difficulties doing so. Now, I can certainly imagine that in complex environments this can be quite problematic; however, all of this is academic and is entirely dependent upon process, policy,hardware, and software. It's like stating that it's less risky to let someone else drive than it is to drive your own car. In some cases yes, in my case, I would argue no, it all depends on the details - and again, I wasn't making generalizations, I was stating my opinion about why I don't use it and the opinion of those in similar positions to myself whose opinion I am aware of.
I would argue pretty much exactly the opposite (albeit not specific to Google Apps)
But this entire thread is about, specifically Google Apps and Google Mail (I presume you meant both of them in this case, if not, I apologize.)
A private company likely has:
1) fewer resources to survive lost sales or opportunity b/c of downtime. 2) less scale to make high availability cost effective 3) far more cash flow sensitive (survival) 4) larger stepping problems with rapid growth/movement/strategic reposition 5) can generally use extra cash flow far more productively elsewhere in the organization, i.e., better to hire an engineer or good salesman than buying IT hardware or hiring an additional IT employee. 6) more likely to need to re-locate and thus re-invest in their data centers (been in that situation several times) 7) probably a bit less likely to be a target of some hacker.
I don't believe that I'm giving short shrift to any "more likely risks."
You may consider the failure rate of industry standard backup hardware to be riskier than storing all of your contracts, designs, patent documents, and corporate e-mail on a publicly traded U.S. company's servers, but I do not.
How quickly can we respond to a problem after hours? What does this have to do with Google Apps? Or is this now about all 3rd party services?
What happens if the admin gets hit by a bus (I use this analogy at the office a lot as well;)) ? The same thing that happens if the person administering our usage of Google Apps gets hit by a bus.
The other issues do not apply, or equally apply to a scenario involve Google Apps.
I understand what your point is, and I agree with it, you certainly can't evaluate anything based upon a single factor; however, trusting all of your data to reside outside your actual corporation is a huge risk that must be outweighed with equally huge benefits.
I have quite clearly stated that my evaluation for my company, and the evaluations of several others in the same/similar positions, is that the rewards don't even begin to approach the risks in the case of Google Apps.
If you need me to make a generalization I would be happy to state that I find it difficult (but not impossible) to imagine scenarios where private companies should use Google Apps.
You would be surprised (hopefully) by how many CIOs base their decisions entirely upon the dollar amounts involved. You'd also be surprised by how many CIOs spend most of their time at work looking for their next position.;)
I did not diagnose the issues for all companies, only for my own and those of the people I know in similar positions who have discussed their issues with me on the topic.
There are many companies, as you said 'both large and small', who make use of third parties for all sorts of sensitive issues which require 'trust.' The only third party that my company involves in our business affairs on the technology and communication side is our ISP (although that trust chain inherits all the ISPs through which communications come from those we do business with.) The operations and administrative sides deal with payroll companies, contract lawyers, patent lawyers, advisory boards, et cetera.
The fundamental issue is far simpler, for myself and the people I was referring to in my original post, than the issues you've highlighted above - trust as few external parties as possible unless you must. That being said, all things are possible and if, in the future, the financial benefits of using Google Apps outweighed our concerns about reliability, security, and privacy, then we could move to using it. That time isn't now though (for us.)
LOL. Sorry, I'm CTO, Software Architect, and the lead developer for a company of less than 50 people. No rounds at Pebble Beach for me, I like beer (Warsteiner or Sam Adams Honey Wheat lately) and I drive a car that cost less than $30,000. CTO is my position because I was hired and report directly to the board, not the President, although I work with him closely. I get the work of both worlds, and the pay of only one;).
I would be interested to hear what you guys/gals use Google Apps for and what specific you don't use it for.
We had, of course (since money is involved), discussed what the ramifications of using Google Apps was and felt it might make (as you mentioned) an good intra/inter team communication media for sharing things (instead of using something akin to Sharepoint), but we were concerned about confining the types of sharing that could be involved due to concerns about the medium. For example, although we use source control, we still get the occasional inter-office tar ball from one dev to another if the receiver has set up a lab environment that doesn't (yet) have access to the source control server...
If we had a little bit smaller team, maybe we'd manage it. I'd probably use it at a start up for a while.
...I can simply relate what things I believe and the things I hear from other CTO/CIOs regarding Google Apps and using Google Mail in a corporate environment. Everyone I know is adamantly against the idea. It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy. That's it, plain and simple.
The idea that our company would place our mail and documents, and the mail and documents of people communicating with us into the hands of another company who are not tightly bound by laws regarding retention and usage? Makes my skin crawl.
I wonder who the first company to be bought by Google will be using Google mail and apps while negotiations are ongoing?;)
Thanks, but I'd rather only have to worry about the ISP, not the ISP and the Cloud. It's unfortunate because I have no interest in running mail servers, exchange servers, file servers, I just want to make software.
...servers as the electricity costs/footprint alone is much more hurtful than a dead tree manual. Green initiative my ass, lying sack of cheap bastards.
"His OpenGL example is hilarious. "Oh my god, I can't use glBegin and glVertex"... Function calls which have been deprecated in OpenGL since version 2, that was 15 years ago!"
What?
glBegin() was deprecated as of OpenGL 3.0.
OpenGL 2.0 was released in September 2004 (5 years ago.)
If you meant OpenGL 1.1, that was 13 years ago, and glBegin() certainly wasn't deprecated.
Believe it? Of course I believe it, and it's exactly how it is.
Senior managers obscuring financial results until well after they have collected their paycheck and left...? You apparently do not understand how senior manager are paid in a public corporation - their rewards are DIRECTLY tied to the performance of the company's stock. This is why the SEC (who are at least good at this one aspect of their jobs) watch senior corporate members stock sales/purchases like a hawk. Salary is relatively nothing in a public corporation.
The board of directors cannot be fired? What do you mean? Individual board members can be removed by the action of the board at ANY time - usually due to direct pressure from stockholders outside of the annual meeting. The entire board? I've never heard of an entire board being replaced, even after a hostile takeover.
Board members and senior management choose the direction of companies with non-huge shareholders simply along for the ride until they decide to jump off? That's not true. Most stockholders tend to group together for the purposes of increased influence, maybe you're referring disinterested stockholders (like mom & pop shareholders who for some reason hold shares on their own.)
Mutual Funds have enormous influence on public companies depending upon the angle at which they've bought in.
AIG is an example of a company that did absolutely everything possible to keep their share prices up, they actually prove my point - not contradict it.
Lehman isn't a good example because they are one of the rare examples of companies whose senior management's recompense is tied to things other than the stock's valuation - although they also did what they could to float the company's stock as long as possible.
Do you really think AIG and Lehman didn't know they were in deep DEEP kimchee until 2 years ago? I personally know a scumbag finance type who bragged just a year ago about how the people at his level (he was mid-level at Goldman Sachs) knew how bullshit the system was and that it would eventually fold but he was busy making his millions (he's semi-retired now in the mid-west the useless sack of sh**) and his bosses were supposedly happy at how they could keep revenue growth increasing while the economy was in a minor depression.
I think you're missing the point. They are not actually 'evil' by any stretch of the imagination, they have different priorities and responsibilities. As soon as a company goes 'public' their single most important driver is the need to enrich their shareholders - that is it. Anything else is purely 'gravy' and subject to the whims of the economy. I guarantee you that if someone were to challenge Google's market seriously Google would do WHATEVER IT COULD to prevent that from happening - whether 'ethical' or otherwise. There'd be no dithering, not stopping to think about it, it would simply happen.
...ANY publicly traded company will do ANYTHING to ensure the continued success of the company because the management is entirely beholden to the stock holders. Google included (although for now a large amount of the stock is in the hands of people still involved in the day to day operations.)
Some day you will be reading a story about Google 'embracing/extending/extinguishing' some new darling technology and you will realize that as soon as a company 'goes public' they lose their soul FOREVER. I'm not against publicly traded companies, I'm against the ridiculous naivete that tries to act like Microsoft is 'evil' and Google is 'good', LOL. From such a simplistic point of view, Microsoft are evil, Apple are evil, Google are evil, IBM is evil, every public company is 'evil.'
The video should have been released with the FOIA request, that is for certain.
What is not for certain is all of the context of the situation prior to the video segment being released by wikileaks. Was this a declared 'no go' zone for journalists? Was this an area were some some sort of published free fire zone? Had bushmaster 7 recently come under fire from here?
While I personally think firing on the van in any of those cases is borderline criminal, firing on the group in the square may have been perfectly legitimate. Does that excuse the lying by the military? No. Does that excuse the pilot and gunner? Maybe - it all depends upon knowing what the situation was.
I'd like to see a full congressional investigation into this. I'd also like to see the people trying to cover anything up absolutely HAMMERED for doing so. If you've done nothing to be ashamed of, why lie about it?
Again, without more information we can't tell if it is murder through blatant stupidity or a case of journalists (and the children) being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
...runs entirely in software on everything from the dreaded MSJVM through modern implementations, does non-linear and blended animations, overbright lighting, has speaking and animating characters, and runs on every platform we've tried including Solaris, OSX, Win-whatever you want, Linux, et cetera. No different code bases, no platform specific anything.
What is it with people claiming "I've built the first rocket to go to the moon" while standing in Huntsville Alabama?
Well, since you've assked;), the name comes from an old Dragon magazine short story about a stubby little dwarf with a giant warhammer he's named 'assmasher' and he does a lot of mashin' in the story - for some reason, as a 10 year old this really hit my funny bone when I read it (weird, I know.) It's a poor choice of nickname but I started using it in the BBS days and am pretty much stuck with it now.
Yes, shamefacedly, plus - need coffee. Actually I ASSumed from the title alone they hadn't seen NeHe since Linux versions are pretty much all there. One awwww-shit screws up fourty-five atta-boys...
Yeah, I cringed after I posted... LOL. Sorry, after reading the title I didn't bother reading the rest because NeHe has Linux versions of just about everything (which I've helped with.)
I guess I ASSumed nobody would look at NeHe and then ask where to get Linux/OGL tutorials:). Hehe. A poor start to the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Then we are in agreement.
But my position, as seen in the original post which you replied to, is that I am clearly referring to my own situation and the situation of the CTOs/CIOs I know. Not a generalist statement against Google apps.
I can only go by my experiences in this area (not other CTOs/CIOs that I know) and state that we've have to restore from backups twice in the past 5 years and had absolutely zero difficulties doing so. Now, I can certainly imagine that in complex environments this can be quite problematic; however, all of this is academic and is entirely dependent upon process, policy,hardware, and software. It's like stating that it's less risky to let someone else drive than it is to drive your own car. In some cases yes, in my case, I would argue no, it all depends on the details - and again, I wasn't making generalizations, I was stating my opinion about why I don't use it and the opinion of those in similar positions to myself whose opinion I am aware of.
But this entire thread is about, specifically Google Apps and Google Mail (I presume you meant both of them in this case, if not, I apologize.)
I don't believe that I'm giving short shrift to any "more likely risks."
You may consider the failure rate of industry standard backup hardware to be riskier than storing all of your contracts, designs, patent documents, and corporate e-mail on a publicly traded U.S. company's servers, but I do not.
How quickly can we respond to a problem after hours? What does this have to do with Google Apps? Or is this now about all 3rd party services?
What happens if the admin gets hit by a bus (I use this analogy at the office a lot as well ;)) ? The same thing that happens if the person administering our usage of Google Apps gets hit by a bus.
The other issues do not apply, or equally apply to a scenario involve Google Apps.
I understand what your point is, and I agree with it, you certainly can't evaluate anything based upon a single factor; however, trusting all of your data to reside outside your actual corporation is a huge risk that must be outweighed with equally huge benefits.
I have quite clearly stated that my evaluation for my company, and the evaluations of several others in the same/similar positions, is that the rewards don't even begin to approach the risks in the case of Google Apps.
If you need me to make a generalization I would be happy to state that I find it difficult (but not impossible) to imagine scenarios where private companies should use Google Apps.
You would be surprised (hopefully) by how many CIOs base their decisions entirely upon the dollar amounts involved. You'd also be surprised by how many CIOs spend most of their time at work looking for their next position. ;)
I did not diagnose the issues for all companies, only for my own and those of the people I know in similar positions who have discussed their issues with me on the topic.
There are many companies, as you said 'both large and small', who make use of third parties for all sorts of sensitive issues which require 'trust.' The only third party that my company involves in our business affairs on the technology and communication side is our ISP (although that trust chain inherits all the ISPs through which communications come from those we do business with.) The operations and administrative sides deal with payroll companies, contract lawyers, patent lawyers, advisory boards, et cetera.
The fundamental issue is far simpler, for myself and the people I was referring to in my original post, than the issues you've highlighted above - trust as few external parties as possible unless you must. That being said, all things are possible and if, in the future, the financial benefits of using Google Apps outweighed our concerns about reliability, security, and privacy, then we could move to using it. That time isn't now though (for us.)
LOL. Sorry, I'm CTO, Software Architect, and the lead developer for a company of less than 50 people. No rounds at Pebble Beach for me, I like beer (Warsteiner or Sam Adams Honey Wheat lately) and I drive a car that cost less than $30,000. CTO is my position because I was hired and report directly to the board, not the President, although I work with him closely. I get the work of both worlds, and the pay of only one ;).
I would be interested to hear what you guys/gals use Google Apps for and what specific you don't use it for.
We had, of course (since money is involved), discussed what the ramifications of using Google Apps was and felt it might make (as you mentioned) an good intra/inter team communication media for sharing things (instead of using something akin to Sharepoint), but we were concerned about confining the types of sharing that could be involved due to concerns about the medium. For example, although we use source control, we still get the occasional inter-office tar ball from one dev to another if the receiver has set up a lab environment that doesn't (yet) have access to the source control server...
If we had a little bit smaller team, maybe we'd manage it. I'd probably use it at a start up for a while.
...I can simply relate what things I believe and the things I hear from other CTO/CIOs regarding Google Apps and using Google Mail in a corporate environment. Everyone I know is adamantly against the idea. It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy. That's it, plain and simple.
The idea that our company would place our mail and documents, and the mail and documents of people communicating with us into the hands of another company who are not tightly bound by laws regarding retention and usage? Makes my skin crawl.
I wonder who the first company to be bought by Google will be using Google mail and apps while negotiations are ongoing? ;)
Thanks, but I'd rather only have to worry about the ISP, not the ISP and the Cloud. It's unfortunate because I have no interest in running mail servers, exchange servers, file servers, I just want to make software.
Ahhh... The Nuremberg defense.
I don't think you understand what pedantic means... Plus, for goodness sake, it was just a joke.
cd /porn
rm -rf
...servers as the electricity costs/footprint alone is much more hurtful than a dead tree manual. Green initiative my ass, lying sack of cheap bastards.
I agree, but women have secrets, water is wet, people are lazy...
...to steal the factory installed DVD system than they are to grab the two iPads in your back seat.
"His OpenGL example is hilarious. "Oh my god, I can't use glBegin and glVertex"... Function calls which have been deprecated in OpenGL since version 2, that was 15 years ago!"
What?
glBegin() was deprecated as of OpenGL 3.0.
OpenGL 2.0 was released in September 2004 (5 years ago.)
If you meant OpenGL 1.1, that was 13 years ago, and glBegin() certainly wasn't deprecated.
Thank you for that :). I was having a shitty day - it's a little bit better now.
...when you actually purchase a product. What a horrific, but seemingly inevitable, solution.
Gack!
Believe it? Of course I believe it, and it's exactly how it is.
Senior managers obscuring financial results until well after they have collected their paycheck and left...? You apparently do not understand how senior manager are paid in a public corporation - their rewards are DIRECTLY tied to the performance of the company's stock. This is why the SEC (who are at least good at this one aspect of their jobs) watch senior corporate members stock sales/purchases like a hawk. Salary is relatively nothing in a public corporation.
The board of directors cannot be fired? What do you mean? Individual board members can be removed by the action of the board at ANY time - usually due to direct pressure from stockholders outside of the annual meeting. The entire board? I've never heard of an entire board being replaced, even after a hostile takeover.
Board members and senior management choose the direction of companies with non-huge shareholders simply along for the ride until they decide to jump off? That's not true. Most stockholders tend to group together for the purposes of increased influence, maybe you're referring disinterested stockholders (like mom & pop shareholders who for some reason hold shares on their own.)
Mutual Funds have enormous influence on public companies depending upon the angle at which they've bought in.
AIG is an example of a company that did absolutely everything possible to keep their share prices up, they actually prove my point - not contradict it.
Lehman isn't a good example because they are one of the rare examples of companies whose senior management's recompense is tied to things other than the stock's valuation - although they also did what they could to float the company's stock as long as possible.
Do you really think AIG and Lehman didn't know they were in deep DEEP kimchee until 2 years ago? I personally know a scumbag finance type who bragged just a year ago about how the people at his level (he was mid-level at Goldman Sachs) knew how bullshit the system was and that it would eventually fold but he was busy making his millions (he's semi-retired now in the mid-west the useless sack of sh**) and his bosses were supposedly happy at how they could keep revenue growth increasing while the economy was in a minor depression.
I think you're missing the point. They are not actually 'evil' by any stretch of the imagination, they have different priorities and responsibilities. As soon as a company goes 'public' their single most important driver is the need to enrich their shareholders - that is it. Anything else is purely 'gravy' and subject to the whims of the economy. I guarantee you that if someone were to challenge Google's market seriously Google would do WHATEVER IT COULD to prevent that from happening - whether 'ethical' or otherwise. There'd be no dithering, not stopping to think about it, it would simply happen.
...ANY publicly traded company will do ANYTHING to ensure the continued success of the company because the management is entirely beholden to the stock holders. Google included (although for now a large amount of the stock is in the hands of people still involved in the day to day operations.)
Some day you will be reading a story about Google 'embracing/extending/extinguishing' some new darling technology and you will realize that as soon as a company 'goes public' they lose their soul FOREVER. I'm not against publicly traded companies, I'm against the ridiculous naivete that tries to act like Microsoft is 'evil' and Google is 'good', LOL. From such a simplistic point of view, Microsoft are evil, Apple are evil, Google are evil, IBM is evil, every public company is 'evil.'
The video should have been released with the FOIA request, that is for certain.
What is not for certain is all of the context of the situation prior to the video segment being released by wikileaks. Was this a declared 'no go' zone for journalists? Was this an area were some some sort of published free fire zone? Had bushmaster 7 recently come under fire from here?
While I personally think firing on the van in any of those cases is borderline criminal, firing on the group in the square may have been perfectly legitimate. Does that excuse the lying by the military? No. Does that excuse the pilot and gunner? Maybe - it all depends upon knowing what the situation was.
I'd like to see a full congressional investigation into this. I'd also like to see the people trying to cover anything up absolutely HAMMERED for doing so. If you've done nothing to be ashamed of, why lie about it?
Again, without more information we can't tell if it is murder through blatant stupidity or a case of journalists (and the children) being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
...runs entirely in software on everything from the dreaded MSJVM through modern implementations, does non-linear and blended animations, overbright lighting, has speaking and animating characters, and runs on every platform we've tried including Solaris, OSX, Win-whatever you want, Linux, et cetera. No different code bases, no platform specific anything.
What is it with people claiming "I've built the first rocket to go to the moon" while standing in Huntsville Alabama?
Well, since you've assked ;), the name comes from an old Dragon magazine short story about a stubby little dwarf with a giant warhammer he's named 'assmasher' and he does a lot of mashin' in the story - for some reason, as a 10 year old this really hit my funny bone when I read it (weird, I know.) It's a poor choice of nickname but I started using it in the BBS days and am pretty much stuck with it now.
Yes, shamefacedly, plus - need coffee. Actually I ASSumed from the title alone they hadn't seen NeHe since Linux versions are pretty much all there. One awwww-shit screws up fourty-five atta-boys...
Yeah, I cringed after I posted... LOL. Sorry, after reading the title I didn't bother reading the rest because NeHe has Linux versions of just about everything (which I've helped with.)
I guess I ASSumed nobody would look at NeHe and then ask where to get Linux/OGL tutorials :). Hehe. A poor start to the day.
I forgot to add, the framework comes in Linux flavors. I have contributed to the Linux tutorials myself there.