Google loses deal to MSFT in its backyard | Hacker News Reader

Google loses deal to MSFT in its backyard

sfgate.com

20 pointskenjackson19 comments

I'll repost here what I commented on the article:

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Down here in Tucson, at the University of Arizona, we've been nothing but plagued with problems using this service. I hope the city of San Francisco has a better experience and receives more support than we have.

I don't remember when the migration to the cloud platform started (the university was/is running their own Exchange install), but the deadline to switch over for all staff was early March. The migration process was afflicted with many problems: it was slow (you hoped it finished overnight), buggy (multiple attempts were necessary), there was often data loss and there were mis-deliveries or message loss for a few days after. That March deadline was postponed more than once and currently, the whole process has been halted leaving us with part of the staff on the cloud system and the other on our IT-managed install.

A month or so ago (probably more), there was a town-hall meeting here with representatives and developers from Microsoft to apologize and to try and resolve some issues in person. The university gave them a two dozen item list of requirements before we proceeded any further with the service. Within the last three to four weeks there have been numerous outages, leaving those already angered here surely even more furious.

If the Microsoft team can't meet our requirements and do it relatively soon, it's very possible that we'll drop this service. (A good chunk of the requirements are for legal compliance).

Meanwhile in my department, we've started the move from a self-hosted Zimbra install to Google Apps for our domain a couple days ago as we can't use the Microsoft solution. Only problems so far are two administrators who use some features in Outlook that we can't replicate with Gmail without shoving a cylinder into a square hole. We might keep the open source version of Zimbra around just for them. What I do love about Google Apps is the ability to script it. I've already written code so that when a given Google Form is submitted, it creates other documents that would've had to have been done by hand, emails people and other things. Over time, this ability to script between Google Apps is going to invaluable for my department.

Anyway, g'luck to the city!

No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft software.

Kind of ironic, considering that phrase originally applied to IBM, which Microsoft also beat out to get this contract.

What about the ex-CEO of the London Stock Exchange with their whole TradElect debacle: http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...

It happened on 2008 but the failed platform is Windows Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2000. There is one big problem in the that event called "Update"!

I'm not sure I understand you fully - are you suggesting that the main problems with that project would have been solved by simply updating to Windows / SQL Server 2008? I can't believe that would possibly be the case.

What I mean is, there is obvious a negligence in the system solution that used in this case, especially for LSE. No system would be working for ever without proper systematical update and tuning. Every system has flaws from time to time. Based on the Server they use, they are at least 5 years behind the time. Why they keep sticking with it? That is the question I have in first place. I am not defending MS. But I don’t think LSE off load MS systems, is purely just because it’s Microsoft. y

It's not really surprising that Google didn't get it given their lack of a significant track record providing enterprise level services compared to IBM and Microsoft. I'll add that the backyard angle probably wouldn't have been mentioned if IBM had been selected over Google even though Armonk is a whole continent away.

What's Microsoft's track record here? "We're retiring XP even though everyone is still using it."? "We will only give you security updates on the first Tuesday of the month, even if it's currently the first Wednesday. Enjoy being hacked."?

I find that Microsoft doesn't care much about its users.

(I bought a netbook a year or so ago. It had Windows 7, which I decided to try instead of immediately installing Linux. The first thing I wanted to do was to change the desktop background. The control panel informed me that I needed to upgrade to Windows 7 Somewhat Awesome Edition in order to do that. The cost was $80.

Friendly or not, the box now runs Debian.)

You know they launched XP in 2001, right?

and that it'll be supported until 2014?

I think that's actually a remarkably good track record of supporting an operating system (for comparison, Debian EOL'd 2.2 in 2003)

I also think Microsoft cares entirely too much about it's users (to the detriment of advancing the platform for fear of incompatibility).

Putting Debian on that Netbook was a smart move though, Windows 7 Starter Edition is an embarassment (it's very close to being cripple-ware), and while all I hear from people who use Netbooks is that "they perform just fine for surfing the web and emailing", I didn't find that to be the case with Windows 7 installed (but it really does run fine with Linux).

At some time microsoft might have to realise that creating gimped editions of windows makes people assume windows is gimped.

I understand that even VirtualPC 2007 will load under Windows 7 even though Microsoft does not officially support it. But in any event, I don't think you should blame Microsoft for your lack of awareness regarding free virtual machine options (e.g. Vmware Player and VirtualBox).

it seems the value here isn't a meager 1M/year, it is the bragging rights. Google boys sound like children : "We're disappointed we didn't have an opportunity to compete for San Francisco's business". Welcome to the big boys world. That was the opportunity to compete.

Exactly. It seems pathetic to me that Google would sue over something like this.

What? "The city will pay the Redmond, Wash. software company a little more than $1 million per year for the new product."

But surely they could use Hotmail or something right? That wouldn't cost $1 million a year?

I'm missing something.

I'm pretty sure that the city doesn't want their employees to have email addresses like "jblow15433@hotmail.com". You pay providers (like Microsoft and Google) to host your email domain as well.

SLAs, privacy, wining and dining and a "you have money" line item.

It is technically a better version of Hotmail. It has no ads, provides better security needed for government usage, restrictions regarding the location of servers and SLAs etc.

In general, all this would probably cost a lot less than the cost of having the services on the premises. As for the comparison with Gmail/Google Apps, I don't know how the comparisons were done there.

[I am a Microsoft employee but I do not represent them. This was mostly from my "common sense"]

I would assume that the City(/County) of San Francisco IT Department also gets access to and control of the backend, in a similar manner as if they were hosting it themselves. This would include things like privacy policies, security and account recovery, spam filter, attachment policies/malware scrubbing, recovery/removal of email when an employee is terminated, usage logs, and some way of obtaining an employee's email in the event of a lawsuit or disciplinary action. Optional possibilities include stronger guarantees about the provider's (in)ability to access the emails, and filtering tools to alert about suspicious (corruption, child porn) or non-work-related (hate speech, regular porn) email content.

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