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Comment by chayesfss | Hacker News Reader

Google is killing microsoft in the government sector, since I'm helping pay for all this I can't tell you how happy I am that they're saving money. GSA went Google and is saving millions.

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And yet, Office revenues are up 7% in the last quarter and Google's revenues from Apps/Docs/Email is still only a few percent. The government is a lot bigger than a few departments.

The primary purpose of Gmail seems to be get people to sign in so that all their web searches can be tracked by Google across computers to users' Google Accounts so that ads can be targeted, not to mention to force Google+ on users. I think it is pretty successful at making people do that.

And the primary purpose of Exchange Server is transfer gobs and gobs of money from unsuspecting organizations to Microsoft.

Locally hosted Exchange is insanely wasteful. Organizations continue to believe that a $25 lock on some closet is "more secure" than a real datacenter and insist on paying 3+ intermediaries' markup on outrageously expensive software licenses and servers, racks, UPSes and other accessories. They buy servers which they barely use, and what cost savings there is gets wiped out by VMWare licensing fees if they decide to do virtualization. Then they've got to pay another company to bring technicians out to maintain the server, change the UPS batteries, etc, at a cost of $100+/hour.

All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.

Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses. I understand that IMAP exists, but no one actually wants to use Thunderbird.

>And the primary purpose of Exchange Server is transfer gobs and gobs of money from unsuspecting organizations to Microsoft.

Apple's and Microsoft's business transactions(except for Bing) are upfront. You pay us this much money and you get this service. Google's is a more subtle "use this free service and we'll track your behavior and try to profit off it, if not we'll kill it".

>All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.

There are thousands of companies that host Exchange for you. Or you have Office 365.

>Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses.

Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?

"Apple's and Microsoft's business transactions(except for Bing) are upfront. You pay us this much money and you get this service. Google's is a more subtle "use this free service and we'll track your behavior and try to profit off it, if not we'll kill it"."

Because upgrades, support incidents, and software assurance are free, and they will give me the manpower to run it all? Where do I sign up? :)

I work with many companies that are still happily running on a 13 year old Windows OS. They don't pay Microsoft for upgrades, support incidents or software assurance because all of that is optional.

With Google, you will always be the product - and you have no choice in that matter.

I hope they also keep their computers away from the internet.

They don't. Did you know that Android is more susceptible to malware than XP is though?

There are ways to protect business computers from the Big Bad Internet too. Can you think of any? I certainly can...

Also I forgot: Google Apps for Business costs money and is ad-free, just like hosted Exchange. They eliminated the ad-supported Google Apps a few months ago.

>There are thousands of companies that host Exchange for you. Or you have Office 365.

But so many small business owners believe (and are reinforced by their IT consulting companies who profit from that belief) that everything must always be hosted onsite.

>Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?

For the same reason any open source software exists. It'd basically be the Outlook component of LibreOffice. And no, I'm not saying "someone make this for me for free!" I'm saying this is a gap open source has yet to adequately fill and I'd be interested in filling it.

Are you speaking to a specific type of company? Plenty of companies "locally" host Exchange in full-blown data centers (some colos, some not) and use those machines to serve hundreds or thousands of users.

Businesses big enough to want sophisticated email and calendaring but small enough to need an outside IT contractor.

Most of the places where I've seen this scenario had between 10 and 50 employees. There are a lot of companies in this range, and the only software company that seems to be catering to their needs is Microsoft (which is drastic overkill in functionality, complexity, and price compared to most of their needs).

Nice try, microsoft "data from 2012 that shows of 42 federal government contracts that both Microsoft and Google competed for during the year, Google had more than twice the success than Microsoft. Of the deals, 23 were won by Google and 10 by Microsoft."

Interestingly, the GSA which supplied that data to the NY Times has also moved to Google Apps in 2011: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/07/gsa-has-gone-go...

I know, we provide their SSO & 2fa solution for access (mail.google.com/a/gsa.gov is a public website as is secureauth.gsa.gov) along with many other government agencies. I've done many identity provider installs, google apps always goes great, office 365, not so much. MS requires them to have adfs which is basically a horrible offering (want to get rid of exchange, here, install all of these adfs servers on premise). Don't get me started.

Isn't it fun to explain that to provide SSO to Office 365 you effectively need 8+ ADFS servers and a couple of pairs of load balancers (or NLB) spread across at least two data center locations?[1]

At least now dirsync is 64-bit so they've removed the "don't run this on your ADFS server" bit.

[1]https://devcentral.f5.com/blogs/us/big-ip-and-adfs-part-1-nd...

and there's the little part about adfs not including any integrated two-factor for external users. Someone can basically sit here all day and bang away at mail.google.com/a/doi.gov with accounts like Bob_Abbey@ios.doi.gov or Ken_Salazar@ios.doi.gov (just google @ios.doi.gov) and it'll never lock out access from your ip.

>Of the deals, 23 were won by Google and 10 by Microsoft."

Nice try Google(?!)

That is a pretty bad comparison without the sizes of the user base of each deal.

"The other cities that use Google Apps are tiny: Orlando, Pittsburgh, etc ..

In public education, the big ones also use Office 365. The entire State University of New York (700,000) use MS Office.

It is true more Federal agencies that use Google Apps -- but the big ones use Office 365. For example, the Dept of Interior (80,000) uses Google Apps, but the Dept of VA (600,000) uses Office 365.

For example, Google supplies email system for tiny Orlando with 3,000 employees

You may therefore be right that "Google Apps is winning its share of government deals". You may say that Google Apps clients include Orlando and Pittsburg. But how do you compare those 2 tiny cities with New York and Chicago??"

Also, not sure why people are cheering on the migration from Office which is primary used for local files to a cloud service where your account and documents are at the complete mercy of the cloud provider.

"The entire State University of New York (700,000) use MS Office."

This is incorrect and I wish whatever source this comes from would get corrected.

Both Google Apps and Office 365 are made available to campuses through streamlined contracts signed at the system level. It is up to each campus to pick which one they want to use.

I'm on a campus that chose the Google offering. We got rid of local storage for student files on our LAN in favor of promoting cloud storage and have outsourced all student and alumni email to Gmail. We're not the only ones in the SUNY system.

Reference:

State University of New York moves 465,000 students over to Microsoft’s Cloud

http://www.winrumors.com/state-university-of-new-york-moves-...

I'm afraid that article is not accurate at all. When reading something about SUNY if it mentions an IT decision being made system wide it's most likely inaccurate bullshit. Nearly every campus has it's own disjoint IT and outside of strong suggestions and price incentives each campus can make it's own choices.

Examples: Oracle is effectively "free" for campuses so why not use that? And using something like Banner or Blackboard lets you ride on existing contracts and share dedicated resource centers. But it's not mandated and there are non-Blackboard campuses (as an example).

There is no Office 365 global movement or mandate in SUNY. It's simply one of two choices IF one decides to use them. It just means each campus doesn't have to bother putting together their own contract as SUNY central took care of it already.

What do revenues have to do with government uptake?

"Google's revenues from Apps/Docs/Email is still only a few percent"

As an example Google gives away service to education so their revenue from that would be $0. As does Office 365 (at least that is what we were offered).

Many copies of Windows and Mac based Office of course is still purchased as frankly Google Docs and 365 are only appropriate for simple use cases.

Remember. If you do everything in your browser, no body cares about whether you're running Windows, OSX, ChromeOS or AmigaOS. That's the point. Get everyone on the web. Force your entrenched competitors onto the web we're they'll be vulnerable to the inevitable openness the web brings.

Office 365 is free at the lowest level. For $2.50/student/month and $4.50/employee/month you get an SLA and the full Office suite for everybody.

It's a real bargain compared to hosting and managing your own email solution, plus students get Office licenses while they're enrolled.

Pricing details at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/compare-office-36...

Those two numbers aren't comparable. One is based on Office's revenue of the prior quarter, and the latter is based on Google's entire revenues. Why'd you bring them up?

> Those two numbers aren't comparable. (...) Why'd you bring them up?

And why are you asking an obviously rhetorical question? ;-)

People present wrong numbers and false information in order to appear to be right to those who don't check facts.

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