Gmail 2010 = Lotus Notes 1995?

Friday, January 15th, 2010

The hissy fit between Google and the People’s Republic of China has been in the news – including the “quality papers” a good deal lately. So, I went to see what’s new at Google for mail users, and spent a while looking around the extended features offered in its Labs, where you can find the stuff Google thinks is going to be cool, neat, and realy useful for those of us who have failed to compress the whole of our existence down to the 140 character limit of Twitter.

It was the sudden flip to using HTTPS which really put me in mind of the comparisons with other email products. HTTPS, Google says, is the answer to concerns over the security of people’s emails, and it had long intended to turn the feature on were it not for the inherent processing overhead to that type of network traffic.

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Microsoft brings the clouds to sunny LA

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

LA may be bathed in warm sunshine, but here at the city’s Sheraton Hotel things are very cloudy indeed. It’s only the preview day of Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, but I’ve already lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard the phrase “cloud computing”.

Tomorrow’s keynote speech by chief software architect Ray Ozzie (pictured) is being trailed with the tagline “cloud computing takes centre stage”, and we’ve been promised in-depth briefings on the Midori/Cloud/Strata (pick your own Microsoft codename) operating system tomorrow.

Yet, even before Ozzie’s curtain-raiser, Microsoft’s staff are already talking up the company’s cloud-computing vision. Group product manager David Appel has already tried to put clear daylight between Microsoft and Google, insisting that consumers and companies want to take their pick of applications to run in the cloud, and those they want to use on their own PCs. The implication was clear: Google may well have a vast repertoire of online services, but it hasn’t got the desktop software to match – no matter what clever tricks it can pull with offline access in Google Gears.

Has Microsoft got a bevy of online services up its sleeve? We’re about to find out.