David Cameron, speaking at the weekend, suggests ditching the Government’s disastrous NHS IT system for a hosted system such as Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault. As The Register points out, it’s probably a bit late for that, but at least the Tories are thinking about modern alternatives to monolithic state computing systems.
So, who do you trust more with your health records, Google or HM Government? Do you want ads with your prescription or your records left on a train?
Google will soon launch Google Voice – a single-number phone service with all the frills you’d expect – voicemail, text, conferencing, etc.
It looks consumer-focussed but the groups feature would probably serve for a small business. Add it to Google Apps and you’ve got quite a package.
Obama has appointed a technologist who’s already used YouTube, Twitter, wikis and Google to streamline government departments’ IT and cut costs.
Vivek Kundra slashed the planned cost of an intranet by 97% by using Google Sites and moved 38,000 employees of Washington DC to Google Apps.
Google’s plans for world domination just leapt forward…
So two hours of Gmail downtime gives the old school ‘run your own servers’ brigade hope that they aren’t doomed to be historical artefacts.
Well, that makes four hours in the last year, which at 99.95% uptime is pretty good. In fact, unless you’re a large company with multiple servers in multiple locations and an army of expensive technicians, that’s far better than you can do yourself. For any company of tens or a few hundred staff, getting Google (or its competitors) to run your services is the best option for reliability, avoids downtime during upgrades and costs a lot less.
At Conosco’s IT support service for small & mid-sized companies, we’re watching Google’s online services closely – they don’t yet offer the functionality that most businesses need, but they will soon.
Factories don’t make their own electricity any more, soon they won’t run their own servers.
Google’s released a beta of Google Sync that lets you synchronise your Google Calendar and Contacts with your iPhone or Windows Mobile phone – another step towards Google Apps being ready for primetime business use.
The good news is that it uses Microsoft’s excellent ActiveSync technology – indeed you enter the Google server details into the MS Exchange config screen on the iPhone, so the Google servers are behaving as the industry-standard Exchange server.
The bad news is that mail is still syncing through the dreadful IMAP protocol, instead of ActiveSync. Conosco’s IT support team are hoping that Google is testing this for release soon, as we hate IMAP and its problems.
El Reg, pulling together various sources, reckons that Google is limiting the number of AdWords impressions so that the top-ranked advertisers get many more – which encourages advertisers to spend more than they otherwise might.
In advertising Conosco’s IT support services, we’ve certainly been inclined to bid to reach only third or fourth place – much cheaper than first and arguably just as visible. But we’ve also long wondered why we’re not spending all our budget whilst not appearing on all search results.
Clever. But that’s Google.
Google have opened the Reseller program for Google Apps – their $50 a user a year online office suite. This will allow IT support services such as Conosco to offer it as part of an integrated IT support service for small & mid-sized companies, wrapped up with configuration and support services.
We don’t think Google Apps is ready for most businesses, but if you can live with the shortcomings it’s a fantastic deal and has some unique features. When it’s ready, IT support will be transformed – in cost and skills needed.
More alarmist science built on bad facts, with some poor newspaper standards to boot. Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross in The Sunday Times reports that two Google searches use as much energy – and so have as much environmental impact – as boiling a kettle.
This doesn’t sound right and, according to Google, is way off the mark - Wissner-Gross’ figure for a Google search (7g of CO2) was a guess and Google has corrected it to 0.2g a search.
And what is the carbon footprint of a newspaper? Nearly 200g, according to the Carbon Trust. And Wissner-Gross? He’s a founder of CO2Stats, a commercial service that makes your web site carbon neutral. Not very clean on either count.
UPDATE: amusing take on the story from The Register.
At Conosco, our IT support service offers virtual servers – so your applications use far less energy.
Just announced at MacWorld – www.iwork.com - Apple is going after Google Docs, using Apple’s lovely iWork desktop apps.
This is the best-of-both-worlds desktop + online approach that Microsoft is using, but MS is at least a year away. And with neither MS nor Apple having Google’s track record in running online services, it’s going to be a good scrap.
We’re watching these services closely at Conosco – our IT support service will be transformed by them.
When everyone yanked their spending after Lehman’s went down, we had another look at Google Apps – $50 a user a year is a huge cost saving on MS Office and you get file sharing, storage and backup/versioning thrown in. Works from any browser so you can ditch Windows too – another big saving.
The problem is… Google Apps/Docs doesn’t work very well. In fact it’s a curate’s egg – the multi-user collaboration in the spreadsheet is brilliantly effective and useful (and unique) but the spreadsheet grinds to a halt on anything larger than a summary profit & loss.
Worse, there’s no folder sharing – so you can’t set up a company’s shared file structure. The file versioning is great, especially in the spreadsheet, but you can’t use Office 07 formats and the Excel exporter eats certain functions.
Most of this is probably being worked on in the Willy Wonka factory, but getting large spreadsheets up to speed might require a browser plug-in – which sounds rather like the desktop software Google is trying to avoid…
Too bad, because it’s the future for many users – freedom from the desktop and power to thin clients.
