back to article Google in preemptive strike on Microsoft Office 365

Google Apps product manager Shan Sinha was once director of strategy for Microsoft SharePoint, Redmond's longstanding effort to facilitate business collaboration over the net. Sinha left Microsoft in the fall of 2007 to create DocVerse, a service that bypassed SharePoint, plugging Microsoft Office clients into Google Apps. …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    All your Secrets are belong to us

    Who in their right mind would put their private documents in the world's biggest snoopers & information resellers?

    1. Beau
      Facepalm

      Don't you start worrying about that!

      "Who in their right mind would put their private documents in the world's biggest snoopers & information resellers?"

      Don't you start worrying about that, there are plenty of idiots in the world who will!

    2. Dante

      You are...

      Bill from the blog's comment section AICMFP

    3. fishman
      FAIL

      And you would trust Microsoft?

      And you would trust Microsoft more? You've got to be kidding.

    4. James Hughes 1

      @ All your secrets

      So, are you saying that Google look/scan the contents of the private documents you store on their servers via apps? And use that data for advertising purposes? Or sell it on to others?

      Is that specifically what you are saying? Do you have any evidence to support that statement?

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      re: All your Secrets are belong to us

      > Who in their right mind would put their private documents in the world's biggest snoopers & information resellers?

      How dare you criticize MICROS~1

  2. DanM

    Tried Google Docs, went back to MS

    Call me when Google lets you customize styles and create your own templates. Apparently they used to, once upon a time, then pulled the plug. This makes them useless for corporate docs.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    @ Orwell

    Google "SAS 70 Type II compliance" - and yes, GAFB is.

  4. John Tserkezis
    Thumb Down

    365 is nothing...

    ...compared to the number of swear words you're going to say when your internet connection goes belly up, and you have clients waiting.

    As the saying goes: Good Luck With That.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pint

      Indeed

      If you run your business on a single internet line AND store your docs purely up there in the wonderful airey, fairy land, then you're not going to be in business very long!

  5. h4rm0ny

    No scheduled downtime.

    And somewhere in the distance, a developer howled...

    1. Ru
      FAIL

      Wrong.

      Downtime may still be scheduled, but now both scheduled and unscheduled downtime apply to the SLA.

  6. Craig 2

    Updating clients

    I always thought updating corporate client software was done with ultra caution, for fear of breaking some compatability that the whole company relied on. If Google (or any other web apps company) start pushing these out to automatically, surely it will eventually create problems? As I always tell people, I can't be perfect ALL the time!

  7. Natalie Gritpants

    I just don't trust this bloke

    Can't put my finger on it, prolly the backstory, but he just comes across as a motormouth more suited to a car showroom.

    1. G C M Roberts

      Yeah

      Let's hope he doesn't bring the magic of his scarepoint success to Google

      Ooh, Supergrass are playing, In IT for the money...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    er... IMAP

    "It's offering a plug-in that transforms Outlook into a Gmail client."

    Don't use Outlook, but I imagine it supported IMAP already? I've used Thunderbird with Google hosted mail for a significant time using IMAP, does fine for me.

    As for security, how many people who wouldn't trust Google hosting their docs happily send the same docs attached to email across the net without any encryption. Come on folks, hands up. You've all done it.

    1. G C M Roberts
      Black Helicopters

      It's funny

      ...but outlook 2010 on imap'd gmail, is strangely buggy.

      My favourite is every email from slashdot getting truncated midway through due to some parsing problem.

      Mine's the black helicopter with the QA team in it

  9. jake Silver badge

    The REAL question is ...

    Will "Whole Foods" have the balls to sue over the "365" copyright & trademark?

    http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/365-everyday-value.php

  10. trstooge

    I don't get all these comments, Google Docs is a godsend...

    I'm the owner of a SME and I really don't get the comments here. I don't care about Google (or Microsoft) looking into my stuff: I'm not competing with them and I know they won't sell my stuff to my competitors. They'll send me even more targetted ads: more power to them and I really don't mind.

    Google Docs are wonderful: I work with people on three continents and we share documents using Google Docs all the time. Oh, btw, we're an IT company. We use the Google Docs API to automatically populate some spreadsheets, etc. Not only we don't need to pay the Microsoft tax anymore (Google Docs works fine on OS X and Linux, goodbye Windows licences, goodbye Office licences) but moreover our docs are available everywhere, at anytime. Offline backups are trivial to do. No more versioning issues.

    There are so many advantages. Way easier computer park administration too btw.

    You guys better adopt to office suites being "in the cloud" (either Google or Microsoft) because they're here to stay and to keep on gaining market share every day. A lot of people that try them simply get hooked: it's just too convenient. And, no, neither Google nor Microsoft will disappear tomorrow so your data is safe. Moreover as I already wrote backups are trivial and the APIs very cool (at least for Google docs).

    1. G C M Roberts

      A very good point

      The only BIG roadblock I can see is weaning corporates off all their excel addins and because of that I don't see anything front office in instituitional banking moving from physical M$ office.

    2. Wpgwill

      well...

      Look at Amazon's fubar with its own cloud service. If that happened to Google or MS Office cloud services what would you do than?

  11. JDX Gold badge

    good but limited

    gdocs are basically little more than an online notepad. Great for sharing data and access from multiple PCs, terrible for anything you need to distribute.

  12. cd

    Never update a client?

    How come Seamonkey won't work with Google Docs suddenly? Looks like a client needing something very much like updating.

  13. revdjenk

    ... more fodder to the pile ... fuel for the fire ...

    ... or one can always use LibreOffice when offline ... to satisfy more complex document formatting than available with Google Docs ... and remain free of MS tax. (Happily utilizing Star/Open/LibreOffice since late 1999.)

  14. Chronos
    FAIL

    99.99 recurring...

    "In 2010, Google says, its services were up 99.984 per cent of the time. And through first several months of 2011, they're at 99.9949 per cent. That translates to about five minutes of downtime per month."

    Yes, that's one end of the link. Now, what about your connection, the ISP, BT outages for DSL subscribers etc, not forgetting how easy DDoS attacks have proven to be just lately. It's alright for the server to be accepting connections when you yourself can't reach the bugger. That'll make you feel a whole lot better, won't it?

    Stupid, stupid idea that is only gaining momentum because it's being pushed hard so that vendors can sell us storage solutions labelled "local cloud cache" or "high availability local storage" or some other whalesong-induced bollocks sometime down the line when they decide their revenue is down. Cyclic sales...

  15. Martin Maloney
    FAIL

    A step backward

    In the old (pre-80s) days of computing, a mainframe hosted the OS, the apps and the data, and users accessed the system with dumb terminals.

    Then came the era of the PC, with OS, apps and data on each machine, with a central file server to store and access data.

    There was a transitional phase, when companies opted for off-site backup services.

    Now we have the cloud. It functions like a mainframe, and PCs function like dumb terminals.

    When using the off-site data backup or the cloud, the first trade-off is security. With all data on-site, all employees are on-site, too. (Yes, there are people who work off-site; however, their hiring is done by the company.) Businesses can screen potential employees; they can't screen potential employees of cloud companies. That's an aspect of the on-site/off-site debate that others haven't addressed.

    The second trade-off that occurs to me is the one-size-fits-nobody cloud apps. For instance, one of my clients is a medical transcription business. They use a third-party medical dictionary in Word. They're stuck with Windows and Word and the third-party spell-checker. Just as they can't use Linux and a Linux office word processing app, a general-purpose cloud word processing app, even if it were high end, would be useless to them.

    The cloud is a forward-into-the-past move back to the era of the mainframe, without the security provided by an on-site system.

    1. John Robson Silver badge
      Coffee/keyboard

      Because...

      Exporting a list of words and adding as a new dictionary is so hard?

      Wait, I've never tried to export from a MS dictionary - but it's got to be easy - surely...

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