It seemed a bit cynical to me?

Readiing this was just unpleasant. If you don't like google don't use their free services, go get a hotmail account or something.

Btw, when the Department of Justice asked for search records from Google, MS, and Yahoo Google was the only one to fight for our privacy (and won).

You seem like a real jerk.

Just poking fun at the campaign Matt :)

Let me ask you, do you like the ad campaign?

> Btw, when the Department of Justice asked for search
> records from Google, MS, and Yahoo Google was the only
> one to fight for our privacy (and won).

And when they do so, I'm happy to continue point it out, too.

The last time I asked about a legal request to Google, I got back the following from Google (July 8):

"As a matter of policy, we don't comment on the nature or the substance of law enforcement requests to Google."

> go get a hotmail account or something.

Here's some fun being poked at Hotmail, in case you're interested:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-11-20-n35.html
http://blogoscoped.com/farewell-to-hotmail.html

I'd prefer Gmail to Hotmail any day, and never liked Outlook at work (searching was so slow, we had to install a plugin). I still don't like Google's ad campaign.

yeah, while some of these are fun, I think most of them are just ridiculous... gmail has the best spam filter hands down (at least the best that you don't have to configure yourself) and surely won't mark any false postives from your boss (known address) as spam...

and yeah, google apps downtime is way shorter than your regular exchange server's

> and surely won't mark any false postives from your
> boss (known address) as spam...

I should've have included <satire> tags around the post :)

Personally I think Gmail's spam filter is great... basically, spam stopped being a big problem for me with Gmail even though I always hand out my email address in unobfuscated format. As for never marking known senders as spam, I believe that's not true – I recently had an email in my spam folder by someone who I regularly email to. That someone didn't include a subject, which might have triggered the spam filter? Still, the bit in the post was just that – satire, here and there with a core of truth, perhaps :)

Day 11: Our companies' docs were stolen and published on techcrunch. We're going back to Office 2007.

Geez... people need to take the internets a little less serious.

"Let me ask you, do you like the ad campaign?"

It's early days, but I like the idea. Think about how many small web start-ups rely on open-source tools such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP). Those small startups, in my experience, are more likely to use Google's search, tools, and apps to keep their costs low and reduce their IT overhead. Why shouldn't other companies find out what is working so well for these startups?

Plus Google eats our own dogfood: we use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Docs to get our work done, and it works very well. I'm a big fan of intranet video, for example. If our 20K-person public company uses Google Apps to be efficient--and Google is quite efficient--then many other companies can as well.

P.S. Rafa, if your company uses Google Apps, we do support two-factor authentication, e.g. http://www.howtoforge.com/two-factor-authentication-for-google-apps-for-your-domain-using-sso-saml-and-wikid-strong-authentication-server

The last fake is really funny.

Rafa: "Our companies docs were stolen... we are going back to Office 2007"

Actually, the hack used a flaw in Hotmail to get to Gmail.
See http://www.product-reviews.net/2009/07/20/microsoft-hotmail-feature-used-to-hack-twitter-email/

Matt, you seem a little bit miffed, it's unlike you :P It's just a little joke.

> It's early days, but I like the idea. Think about how many small
> web start-ups rely on open-source tools such as Linux,
> Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python (LAMP). Those small
> startups, in my experience, are more likely to use Google's
> search, tools, and apps to keep their costs low and reduce
> their IT overhead.

Yes, we mostly agree on that. And this is a conversation, because you wrote what you think, like you do in your blog – including allowing self-criticism – and you don't paste ready-made email templates, or recite slogans. Now as for the ad campaign... ah well, this post was still just a bit of fun :)

> I should've have included <satire> tags around the post :)

I liked it.

> Outage today. Go home!

A winner.

Did Philipp write the fakes? Did Kfir write them? Are they from another site?

I liked them too. Although, maybe its because I dont like Google at all.

George, I credited Kfir because in this thread http://friendfeed.com/parislemon/b74c15ce/google-launches-major-offensive-against he wrote the comment... "I have alternative text: Day #3 – our Google App based corp mail is bouncing and we don't know why. No one responds in Google" That inspired this post...

hold up problem, i.e., once we depend upon google or google becomes a monopoly it charges us through the nose to maintain its high margin structure.

do not give your soul even if google pays to you for it. maintain your freedom, use either open source stack or if a commercial stack is needed use microsoft. both stacks have proven by actions that they won't hold you up. let google also prove it by action and not by billboards. subscription pricing is an artifact of hold up problem.

> Actually, the hack used a flaw in Hotmail to get to Gmail.
See product-reviews.net/2009/07/20 ...

I wouldn't call it "using a flaw in hotmail" as that is how the service is advertised to work. There was no flaw at all involved.
But that is irrelevant to the point. It doesn't matter who's fault it is. The problem is that when you are using cloud based services to host your data, whatever flaw there is in that platform, your data is no longer yours.
With a client side solution, flaws can be dealt with on an individual basis. Yes, there are flaws and they are a problem, but it is not like ever single serious flaw, even if it is not in your service provider but on another related service, means end of game for all your documents.
I guess many will fall for it, and go with Google apps. And then there will be some serious disclosure event and companies will lose huge amounts of money due to it (or people will go to jail) and then companies will begin reevaluating this strategy.

I think it most certainly is a flaw in Hotmail. I don't know of any other major service that recycles IDs in this way. Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, ICQ and so on maintain IDs FOREVER. They may disable an Inbox or other functionality until you next try and log in again, but to just put the ID back out there for re-use is almost criminal.

The bad new for not recycling IDs is of course that eventually it is almost impossible to pick a meaningful ID from the millions that have already been used (and mostly discarded) but once again, Microsoft values their twisted sense of "usability" over security (which should be at the top of any usability features list).

If I were Google I'd take MS off the list of potential secondary e-mail addresses.

It would be more humorous if more of the digs had a basis in reality.

No phone support? Where is the phone support for Yahoo, MSN or any other FREE online service?

Downtime? Practically non-existent for most Google services, particularly e-mail. Downtime of more than a minute is so rare it always makes national news when it happens. Where is the service that has done better at this?

I'm not always happy with what Google does (the transition from pages to sites is an ongoing disaster... someone figure out how to make it funny for those of us who tried to set up web pages for others) but most of the implied criticisms here just don't apply. to people who read this and don't know any better they must think Google isn't even worth trying.

"Plus Google eats our own dogfood: we use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Docs to get our work done, and it works very well."

Matt Cutts
About Docs. Is that the same version we other users are getting? E.g. there was a great hubbub about throwing out option"s like "Items not in Folders", "Shared with..." and removing the Published indicator in the Google DOcs files list in the Google Docs forum. I saw no Googlers posting on that subject...
Neither do I see any Googlers complain about limitations of Google Docs, like the issues with how spreadsheet floating point calculations can cause "off" results. Or how the text documents drive people crazy when import or export them. Not to mention the problems when sharing/unsharing files.

The problem is not that people don't want to use Google Docs, but that marketing provides a very rosy outlook and appears to forget that even while the beta label has been lifted the application still is very much in transit from beta to stable.

I work for Microsoft, and even I can see that this is a satire piece and not to be taken too seriously.

However, judging from the kind of "passionate" responses that people are posting here in defense of Google, perhaps there is a little bit of truth to some of these billboards?

(I don't know, I personally haven't used Google Apps before except for GMail, which I think is fabulous).

Matt, Google has an incentive to put up with the flaws of its apps in a way no other company in the world does. Plus it was born an Internet company , which is true of very few businesses – and even fewer big corporations. Further, as a matter of security, Google can of course store its proprietary business data on its apps servers – which would not apply to any other company "going Google". I could see Google getting some take-up from cash poor start-ups and small businesses. But I suspect Fortune 500 companies or similar are an entirely different culture.

mark "Btw, when the Department of Justice asked for search records from Google, ..."
Ahem:

"The Google Search Subpoena in Perspective"
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-01-26-n76.html

I think one of the reasons is that some of the things listed there are items that we are extremely proud of doing right (in our opinion) and that we spend an amazing amount of time and work on to get right. Handing out user data? I really don't think it's fair to tell someone like Matt that we hand out user data on a whim.

John, Google say that as a policy they do not comment on what they do and don't hand out based on legal requests – how would you say should the public go about evaluating how Google handles this, then?

I think the term of art is SLA (Service Level Agreement) which is a document that companies big and small use to define at what point a promised service has failed to deliver and is subject to some remedial action.

I find the notion that big companies don't contract out handling of critical documents odd from anyone claiming to be an industry expert.

Ever heard of off-site backups?

Most companies do not self-administer this function, including parts of the Federal government.

The fact is that many companies, including medium to large sized ones have such sloppy data handling procedures that the very best thing they could do would be to turn it all over to someone else.

I do think it would make sense at some point for Google (and others) to invent some sort of turn-key box (as Google does for search) that might do record archival, e-mail, and other such functions where even highly paid employees and consultants typically make mistakes.

The alternatives are no more secure than getting night-time access to an office machine and applying password crackers.

The notions that just because it is on my premises it is safe is ludicrous.

Macbeach wrote:
> I find the notion that big companies don't contract out
> handling of critical documents odd from anyone claiming
> to be an industry expert.

You're absolutely right, which is why we mostly hear this line from "pundits" rather than people who actually work in the business.

Many corporations trust their data to third party off-site backup services; they trust their documents to postal mail; they make unencrypted telephone calls; they have their sensitive documents shredded by third-party document disposal businesses; their offices are cleaned by independent contractors; they have business meetings in restaurants where they might be overheard; etc.

If Google's security is "good enough", and the service is useful to corporations, then plenty of corporations will use it. Storing the data "off the premises" won't be the deal-breaker.

Will Google read content of my apps to serve me up targetted adverts just like they do with Gmail?

Yes, everybody, please use Google docs. Get into your time machine and go back to Office 95 and party on. Google is a joke of a software company with a fantastic PR machine. When a billboard is your most interesting creation, you have a problem. (apart from the agressively defended monopoly on search.)

FWIW I work "in the business" – I manage 45,000 desktops. Anyone who would trust their docs to google is a moron – trusting your documents to the company that bends over for every government who asks is just dumb.

If your company isn't smart enough to host and manage it's own data, then you need to fire the IT staff and hire people who are.