Archive for category: Blog

The unofficial Google Operating System blog tells us how here: Export Data From Google Services

As reported by ChannelWeb, Steve Ballmer touched on many issues at Microsoft’s Strategic Update Meeting in New York last week. Here is my take after reading the quotes:

1. SEARCH: Microsoft is not making money from Search and may be slowing its rate of investment
2. Microsoft is threatened by netbooks and is considering how to adjust its Windows 7 strategy to avoid loosing market share to Linux and other OS’s
3. Google, with Android, and Linux threaten Microsoft’s client operating system dominance
4. Microsoft denies they are creating a smartphone, but have they really accepted the “market mojo” of the iPhone and Blackberry?
5. Microsoft knows they need a lower cost server operating system — watch for Foundation Server
6. Microsoft still sees pirated versions of Windows as the biggest threat to their OS business
7. Microsoft IE is losing market share: Ballmer admitted that “Browsers are key features of operating systems”, in contrast to their answer to anti-trust concerns that IE is not part of the OS
8. Microsoft wants to R&D itself through the current economic times
9. Microsoft has not figured out how to make money with Office Live, yet; Windows Azure (server in the cloud) may be ready by November 2009
10. OpenOffice is a growing threat, starting with the educational market

In all of his comments, Ballmer seems to be missing the gap between the features Microsoft deliver and the subset of those features most customers actually use. If the threats he acknowledges offer simpler feature sets, but meet most customers’ needs, Microsoft could be in big trouble.

PC Magazine is reporting that HP is discontinuing its online backup services, known as Upline. Without any public press release from HP, customers have received notice of the service termination and will be receiving full refunds.

While generally regarded as a slick service, Upline had significant service quality issues.

This announcement follows Yahoo’s announcement that the Yahoo Briefcase service would also come to an end. Yahoo Briefcase, a free service, limited users to 30MB of data — an amount the marketplace deemed to lack any real value.

Tuesday Morning, from about 4:00 am to 7:00 am EST, many users could not access Gmail through the web interface. For Google Apps Premier Edition users, the impact appears to have been only the web access — IMAP access was working from our iPhones and we could still generate calendar updates and invites, site invites and update notices, and google doc sharing invites.

From some in the “blog-o-sphere”, this outage is the reason why Cloud Computing will fail. In our view, this is why cloud computing is viable. Most businesses could not recover from a major email outage, with no loss of data, in three hours.

Google has already completed a post mortem and has published the results here.

Additionally, they have responded by creating an Apps Status Dashboard that provides real time status indicators for all applications in the Google Apps Premier Edition suite.

In our opinion. Outages will always happen. That Google was able to respond quickly, restore service, fix the underlying issue (actual cause), and improve processes and communications, is a clear indication that the market demand for perfection will drive continuous improvements in the service. As a side note, Google has automatically credited all effected users with 15 days of services, exceeding what is required in the Service Level Agreement.

When the mainstream media reports on a technology trend, is the trend over? Let’s hope not. In a stroke of industry insight, CNNMoney.com is reporting that “Web Conferencing Booms”.

The article gives case studies and pricing for Citrx GoTo Meeting and GoTo Webinar services (both great services), while taking a few jabs at Cisco WebEx (another great service).

For many, Web Conferencing is a great first venture into Cloud Computing. It is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that meets a clear need and has easily quantified returns on investment. Combined with Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone service, the benefits can be even greater.