Google’s not-so-subtle jab at Microsoft Exchange
When Gmail goes down, it doesn’t just make news, it makes people angry. Small businesses running their email on Google’s servers complain publicly. People even talk about suing Google.
Google’s response is usually along these lines: When companies manage email on their own servers, those servers routinely go down. People get upset, sure. But it doesn’t make news. And nobody starts looking for a class-action attorney.
Apparently, that attitude of Google’s isn’t just a defensive PR spin. It’s an actual strategy. Google is adding a feature to the cloud-security technology it obtained when it bought Postini in 2007. Google is calling it Message Continuity, and it’s designed to let companies have access to emails, even when a company’s servers go down.
It’s a cunning idea, for a couple of reasons. When corporate email does go down, Gmail (and Google Apps) will look like an attractive alternative. But also, the move is a direct jab at Microsoft. It sends a subtle but effective message that Google is more reliable email service than Microsoft.
But there’s a catch for Google – if a Microsoft Exchange system goes offline at the same time that Gmail has one of its occasional outages, it will look even worse for Google. Promising you’ll be there when the other guy isn’t makes it that much more important that you follow through.
Should you trust Facebook with your email?
- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -
Facebook already knows a massive amount about you. They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.
On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history of privacy breaches or at least snafus. Publicly they seem committed to the notion that privacy is dead. Their CEO and Founder has said as much.
Never mind that this view is not shared by the public, which is hungry for privacy in the digital age. And never mind that the “death of privacy” would serve exactly the interests of a digital media company. It seems that it may be an honestly held belief among top leadership of Facebook that privacy is and should be dead.
Now, Facebook is expanding its reach even further. It will be rolling out a unified, cross-platform messaging system that will combine features of email, SMS, and chat. The company will offer users @facebook.com email addresses. At first blush, there’s nothing altogether new about the development from a technical standpoint. Unified messaging has been a goal since the advent of disunified messaging—more or less since SMS, IM, and chat became comparably popular and used in parallel.
But a Facebook-based unified messaging system may offer different appeal and new risks, and not just because it can instantaneously distribute its feature set to its 500 million-plus user base.
It is impossible for a digital media company to care deeply about privacy. You are the only asset they have to sell. The promise of advertising in the Internet age is that the platform can connect a brand with the individual person most likely to buy. The only way that happens is through the collection and use of huge amounts of data about each of us, followed by the sale of access to the data or the person they describe.
Facebook is already sharing information that I, obviously, never shared or agreed to share on Facebook, since I have never joined. They have already taken the liberty of passing my private email information without consent.
The statement by their CEO/Founder, that ‘Privacy is and should be dead’ is a clearcut admission of guilt of a global invasion of privacy. The only thing Facebook should be trusted with is a jail cell.
Nielsen Says – In: social networking; Out: email
Anyone with a Facebook account knows how addictive social networking can be. But a new report by analytics firm Nielsen illustrates just how central social networking has become in the Average Joe’s day-to-day life.
Nearly a quarter of Americans’ online time is now spent on social networks, according to Nielsen. And all that time spent on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is coming at the expense of traditionally popular Web activities, particularly email.
Email accounted for 8.3 percent of Americans’ online time in June, down from 11.5 percent a year earlier.
The total number of minutes that Americans spent using email in June plunged 34 percent year-over-year, while the total number of minutes devoted to social networking jumped 31 percent year-over-year.
“When you’re on Facebook, you can do instant messaging, you can email and share content,” said Nielsen analyst David Martin. “Maybe an assumption is that social networks are directly displacing some of these traditional channels for communication online.”
That’s not great news for the Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts of the world, which have built substantial email businesses over the years.
To make matters worse, Nielsen said the “portal” category — web sites like Yahoo or AOL — represented 4.4 percent of Americans’ online time in June, compared to 5.5 percent a year earlier.
Completely agree, people are speaking on Facebook walls and no longer writing emails
from Breakingviews:
Put BlackBerry on hold – but not for long
BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion is a victim of its own success. Having dominated the market for corporate e-mail devices for years, it is being forced to seek out growth in consumer markets, where, so far, it has had trouble differentiating its products.
Going mainstream has helped vastly expand its consumer base -- which now represents half of all BlackBerry subscribers. Fully 80 percent of its new subscribers now come from outside its traditional corporate base.
But that success is coming at a growing cost to the once lofty average selling price of its phones, the latest quarterly results show. Profits for its second fiscal quarter dipped 3.5 percent, amid weak subscriber growth. Product prices appear under pressure at both ends of its business, both among corporate users and with consumers.
Fixing these issues will take time, several quarters at least, something which investors who have bid the stock up more than 100 percent in the past year were not prepared to hear: they sent RIM stock tumbling 17 percent, to below $70, on Friday.
The trouble is that RIM must develop and introduce new products that can recapture customer attention in increasingly crowded markets. Phone companies must be convinced to sell the new BlackBerrys in their stores. Consumers must get the message. Rivals have to be kept at bay.
And RIM no longer has the luxury of retreating to its corporate base. There has been a proliferation of rival devices from the Apple iPhone to newer phones from HTC and Motorola based on Google's Android operating system, all of which now offer customers secure access to Microsoft Exchange e-mail and contacts.
The company is desperate for a hot new product to replace its three-year-old Pearl phone, its first device to make a splash in consumer markets. Its standout keyboard for text input is less special than it once was. Rival mobile phone makers offer better cameras, more memory and a wider selection of zippy software for their devices.
Google finds panacea to the ill-advised email
How many times have you smacked your forehead in frustration after sending a bawdy e-mail to your boss that had been meant for a friend?
Until now, there had been no way to retrieve the missive. Even if the person’s on vacation, it’s only a matter of time before – as the saying goes – your nether region is grass. Enter Google’s Gmail Labs and “Undo Send”. If you enable the feature, every time you hit ‘send’, a button allowing you to ‘undo’ the send will pop up along with confirmation that the e-mail has been sent. You have five seconds to decide.
Etiquette hounds coach you to leave the “to” blank while you write an e-mail (especially if it’s a subject you feel strongly about) and not forward an e-mail without permission. As author and business consultant Tim Sanders says, “you never need to send an e-mail that’s regrettable.” But it happens all the time.
With Google’s snazzy new tool, if you click “undo”, the message is brought back to the first, “compose” screen. But it hasn’t won over everyone.
“That’s a really small window,” said Sanders, who was part of a May 2006 study on how people use e-mail. The study, which included 16,000 people, in part examined which e-mail messages were regrettable and why. “We make a lot of mistakes over e-mail that sabotage our lives,” Sanders said. “You’d need [the waiting period to be] a day to really prevent yourself from making mistakes.”
If you feel the same way and want, say, a drop-down menu where you can set the amount of time you want the undo option to last, let Gmail Labs know by sending them feedback. You’d be building a delay into a technology that is prized for its speediness, but it might save you your job.
These are just the sort of tricks that are increasing Google’s market share. Google saw a 32 percent worldwide increase in unique visitors to its Web sites last year, according to comScore. The total number of visitors topped 775 million – compared to Microsoft’s 20 percent increase to 647 million visitors and Yahoo’s 16 percent increase to 562.6 million visitors
Google enters Skype territory
Google’s at it again.
The Web search leader edged into Skype’s territory at on Tuesday with a feature that allows multitasking Gmail users to video chat, IM and email all at the same time.
Mail Goggles block those messages you shouldn’t send
“Beer goggles” can make you do things you may later deeply regret but Gmail hopes its new “Mail Goggles” will ensure that sending embarassing emails isn’t one of them.
The feature, rolled out this week by Google, requires users to solve a few timed math problems after they click the “send” button, to verify they are “in the right state of mind” to send that late-night missive.
In its default setting, Mail Goggles is active only late on weekend nights “as that is the time you’re most likely to need it,” but can be activated at other times as well, Gmail engineer Jon Perlow said in a posting on the Official Gmail Blog.
Perlow said he designed Mail Goggles to spare others the pain inflicted by messages that should never have seen the sober light of day — that desperate love letter to your ex, or the brilliant riposte telling the whole office what you really think of your boss.
My problem is I write the crazy stuff when I’m pre-menstrual, not drunk. Do you have something to filter hormonally charged chicks?
Interesting read but there is a fundamental problem with not only your article but the material you referenced as well. The problem is your article as well as Google press release are comparing a Google Cloud resource to a Microsoft On premise or traditionally hosted resource.
If you want to compare apples to apples wouldnt you think it would be better to compare Microsoft’s cloud hosted email offering to googles cloud hosted email offering?
They probably chose not to go that route because it would have been futile. You see Microsoft hosts Exchange in its Windows Azure cloud offering which is backed by 23 datacenters around the world that have a new construction cost of $500,000,000 each. Heres a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3b5Ca6lz qE&feature=related
So enterprise customers using exchange cloud hosted offering have their data not only backed up and replicated 3+ times but they also have the access to it automatically load balanced and provisioned. They also offer a CDN or content delivery network to cache frequently accessed data/emails from an in memory instance greatly enhancing speed.
So in reality what happens when a cloud hosted exchange server goes down is nothing. There is no interruption because a replication picks up the request while the down instance is restarting. They have an “all 9’s” SLA that is 99.9% up time.
THE ONLY WAY A MICROSOFT CLOUD HOSTED EXCHANGE USER WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ACCESS THEIR EMAIL IS IF THERE WERE CATOSTOPHIC OCCURENCES ON ALL CONTINENTS TAKING OUT ALL DATA CENTERS…which at that point email probably isnt a concern
Google has also made in roads in the cloud space no doubt but not anywhere on the usability scale as Microsoft. (its an end to end solution)
That said logic and debate are very detached from the things that are suggested in this article. Microsoft has in fact leveraged the cloud to enable the sort of occasionally connected scenarios you are describing here.