With Office 365, Microsoft Hopes To Counter Google's Threat

With its new web-based version of the popular Microsoft Office suite of software, Office 365, Microsoft is attempting to reclaim territory that has been threatened in recent years by web giant Google and its Google Docs service.

For years, Microsoft was the undisputed king of software, with the sale of operating systems, like Windows, and applications, like Microsoft Office, at the heart of its success. Yet rivals have since threatened the company's dominance in software. One of the most noteworthy challengers has been Google Docs, which lets users create, share and access documents online, and is offered for free to individuals, but sold to businesses. As the advantages of and demand for cloud-based computing grow, the introduction of Office 365 signals Microsoft’s effort to ward off Google and defend the billions it earns from selling the software that still dominates in the board room.

Experts say that the still-emerging nature of the cloud marketplace means that Microsoft may be able to leverage its existing dominance in the enterprise market to keep ahead of Google, which has historically had a more consumer-driven focus, and still counts only about three million businesses as Google Apps users. Microsoft, meanwhile, boasts ten times as many users of its Office Web Apps.

But while Microsoft still has control over the enterprise market -- and is attempting to preserve it -- it's worth reflecting on the dimming star of RIM's Blackberry phone, a once dominant enterprise device that's been slowly overtaken by consumer smartphones like the iPhone and Google’s Android phones. More and more, employees are setting the tone of the tech that takes the office place. So will Microsoft be able to protect its place in the software pantheon?

"Microsoft and Google have been sparring over defectors from other platforms and have momentum, but Microsoft has far more momentum among enterprises," said Chris Voce, an analyst with tech research firm Forrester.

Office is Microsoft's cash cow, a key component of the company's business strategy and a cornerstone of its enterprise offerings, accounting for 30 percent of the company's 2010 revenue. With Office 365, the company is moving Outlook email, its SharePoint collaboration, and Office apps like Word, PowerPoint and Excel onto the web, letting users access the tools from any connected device. Microsoft's move is a clear strike against Google Apps, which have stolen away a small but troublesome percentage of its enterprise customers.

Microsoft launched Office 365 with an eye to small- and medium-sized businesses, where Google has had the most success. The service is not built for consumers. Office sales have long been an important revenue source for Microsoft, and were a bright spot in the company's last earnings report, which showed decreasing sales in Windows software as companies like Apple move to the forefront. Revenue for Office rose 24 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Though Microsoft is currently in the lead when it comes to selling software to businesses, Google's major strength may be its longstanding presence as the go-to cloud app for consumers. While enterprise customers do have to pay for access to Google Apps, ordinary users receive Gmail, and its suite of applications, such as Google's Office equivalents, for free. Microsoft's service runs from $2 to $27 per business user, and simply allows businesses that might already be using Office the option to go to the cloud with the services they already have in place.

"There is an element of consumerization of IT at play," said Voce. "If people use tools in their day-to-day lives, they're comfortable using them in the workplace. Google doesn't match Microsoft in terms of business sophistication, but they do have mindshare among users as a growing comfort. They have a lot of people who are very used to using their tools. The question is can the tools stand up in the business place?"

Google offers certain features to encourage users to make the switch from Microsoft. Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange lets users move email, calendars, contacts and more, over to Google Apps. A Google Cloud Connect plug-in for Microsoft Office lets people use Google collaboration within the program.

Yet Microsoft has one huge advantage: 97 percent of businesses surveyed still use Office, according to IDC analyst Melissa Webster. And for the past two decades, Microsoft's products have been the standard in businesses, presenting Google with the challenge of converting entire companies over to an entirely new system. Further, Microsoft's Office products, like Excel and PowerPoint, include a higher level of sophistication and a wider array of features than their still relatively bare-bones Google Apps counterparts.

"Google offers a subset of Microsoft's productivity portfolio," Webster said. "Customers have to go elsewhere for web, video, and audio conferencing, for example. Microsoft's broader footprint gives it a big advantage -- given a choice between an integrated single-vendor solution (one throat to choke) and a multi-vendor best-of-breed approach, the best-of-breed vendors have to prove significantly greater value. That's difficult to do in a more mature market, where the feature sets in available products are already strong."

Still, Google, at least, has declared itself up to the task.

"Technology inevitably gets more complicated as it gets older," wrote Google Apps Product Manager Shan Sinha on the official blog. "Upgrading platforms and adding features results in systems that are increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use. At times like these, it's worth considering a clean-slate: an approach based on entirely modern technologies, designed for today’s world."

In the end, though, both Google and Microsoft may simply be battling the same demons. Cloud computing still poses major risks to users who must count on the security and reliability of important documents. The rise in the visibility of hack attacks in the past year has only hammered home the point that this is a technology still groping towards maturity.

"Cloud services for collaboration and personal productivity are in their infancy," Gartner analyst Matthew Cain wrote in an email. "For example, only 3-4% of the enterprise market for email is in the cloud, and it will not hit the 10% mark for a couple years. So it is very early days. But it is clear that the vendors that are early in the market –- namely Google and Microsof -- will have an early mover advantage."

Google's Clean Energy Report Reveals Innovations And Policy Could Help Economic Goals

Google made two major announcements yesterday. One was about a new Google social network, Google +, expected to compete with the likes of Facebook. The other announcement was that saving the world could also save us a lot of money. The latter revelation somehow fell unnoticed amid debate over the plus and minuses of Google +, but it is significant nonetheless.

Google’s report, “The Impact of Clean Energy Innovation,” aimed to measure the potential effects of clean energy on both the energy landscape and the U.S. economy.

The analysis was conducted by assuming that there were “aggressive hypothetical cost breakthroughs (BT) in clean power generation, grid-storage, electric vehicle, and natural gas technologies and compares them to Business as Usual (BAU) scenarios modeled to 2030 and 2050.”

They found that, when compared to BAU in 2030, aggressive energy innovation alone could grow the U.S. economy by over $155 billion in GDP/year, create over 1.1 million new net jobs, and save U.S. consumers $942/household/year. Not to mention the environmental and security benefits – this model could reduce U.S. oil consumption by over 1.1 billion barrels/year and cut U.S. total greenhouse gas emissions by 13%.

In other words, aggressive clean energy innovation would not only help the environment, but also boost U.S. economic and security goals.

Additional scenarios added the “Clean Policy” path, where there were also federal incentives and mandates. With this path, the U.S. economy could grow by over $244 billion in GDP/year, and generate over 1.9 million jobs. According to The New York Times, without a shift in government policy, the study found that improvements in energy storage could simply lead to a greater use of coal, with Google’s green energy czar Bill Weihl stating, “Basically it’ll allow you to run the cheapest thing you’ve got, more.”

The report also found that speed is key. Delaying innovation by just five years could result in $2.3-3.2 trillion in unrealized GDP and up to 1.4 million net unrealized jobs. 

Google has made major efforts in the past to encourage clean energy. Google Earth offered climate change videos and trainings during COP 16. Reuters notes that earlier this month, Google announced it would help finance a $280 million residential solar power project, and the company is also part of a group backing a $5 billion transmission line to transport electricity from wind farms.

There are certain controversial factors in Google's most recent report that should be noted, such as the inclusion of new nuclear energy and natural gas. According to the report, “In this study, nuclear refers to any fission or fusion process capable of achieving breakthrough cost/performance levels.” While it was a component included as a “clean power breakthrough,” some environmental advocates would argue that nuclear energy, even though carbon-free, isn't "clean" for the environment, citingJapan’s nuclear crisis as a recent example.

While echoing the Obama administration's definition of clean energy, Google's inclusion of natural gas is highly controversial as well. Google writes, “Natural Gas has undergone a revolution in just the last few years driven by the advent of shale technology. What if innovation in gas technology continues, bringing additional low-cost resources online?” But natural gas has created controversy in recent years, particularly with the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” the health effects of which are currently being studied. While the Google report found that cheap natural gas could reduce greenhouse gas emissions when compared to coal in the short term, the report also found that in the long term, it slows the deployment of clean energy sources.

Google also acknowledges the challenges of actually achieving their ideal scenarios, writing on theirblog, “We haven’t developed the roadmap, and getting there will take the right mix of policies, sustained investment in technological innovation by public and private institutions and mobilization of the private sector’s entrepreneurial energies.”

As Matt Hourihan of The Energy Collective writes, "Google makes some fairly substantial assumptions about energy costs. Some of these are quite aggressive indeed. For example, under Google’s assumptions, onshore wind costs decline by more than 50 percent by 2050 –- twice as much as the IEA has predicted." But he is quick to add that "by establishing technology costs as the fundamental driver of success or failure, it’s pushing the right conversation."

Despite the challenges and controversial factors, their findings remain remarkable.

As the magazine “Death + Taxes” writes, “Sure, it behooves the company to try to stay competitive with Facebook. But for the sake of future life on earth… the company would do well to focus its news releases on areas where its formidable smarts can really make a difference.”

Which will matter more to our great-grandchildren -- social networking or global warming?

Hacker attack cripples al-Qaida Web communications

WASHINGTON — Computer hackers shut down al-Qaida's ability to communicate its messages to the world through the Internet, interrupting the group's flow of videos and communiqués, according to a terrorism expert.

"Al-Qaida's online communications have been temporarily crippled, and it does not have a single trusted distribution channel available on the Internet," said Evan Kohlmann, ofFlashpoint Global Partners, which monitors the group's communications.

The attack was carried out within the past few days by unknown hackers targeting al-Qaida's Internet communications systems. It was "well coordinated and involved the use of an unusual cocktail of relatively sophisticated techniques," Kohlmann said.

"My guess is that it will take them at least several days more to repair the damage and get their network up and functioning again," he said.

A year ago, al-Qaida's Internet communications suffered a similar hacker attack.

British newspapers reported earlier this month that the the UK government hacked into an al-Qaida website last year and inserted recipes for making cupcakes in place of instructions on how to build bombs. The target was the group's English language magazine, "Inspire," intended for Muslims in the West. The magazine is the product of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen.

Story: UK spies hack al-Qaida, replace bomb info with cupcake recipes

Instead of an article called "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," the online magazine contained recipes from a book assembled by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. It took the terrorist group nearly two weeks to restore its original posting.

Kohlmann said the latest incident "once again appears to bear the telltale fingerprints of government-sponsored hackers."

Facebook Credits Violate Antitrust Laws: Consumer Watchdog

Facebook Credits let you buy as many bushels of virtual zucchini as you'd like. They may also violate antitrust law.

Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing Facebook's virtual currency system of anti-competitive behavior. The complaint asks that the FTC issue an injunction stopping Facebook from continuing its behavior and that it investigate Facebook's relationship with social gaming giant Zynga.

According to a press release from Consumer Watchdog, virtual goods will raise $2.1 billion in revenue in 2011. Facebook, which reportedly hit 750 million members worldwide recently, has over half the market for virtual goods. Games like Farmville, Smurf's Village and others, allow users to game within virtual worlds and use real-world money, via Facebook Credits, to buy digital goods.

Facebook's proprietary Credit system becomes mandatory on July 1 and will require that game developers use only Facebook Credits when charging for goods in their games. Under the new contract, developers must charge the same price for their virtual goods sold within Facebook as those sold outside of Facebook, meaning that a developer can't offer a discount to users for purchasing goods on the developer's website rather than on the social network. Facebook will also charge 30 percent fees on each in-game purchase.

Because social games are mostly found on Facebook, Consumer Watchdog charges that Facebook's new Credits contract will let the social network "maintain and extend its monopoly power," meaning developers "must agree to adhere to Facebook Credits if they want to compete in the relevant market." By forbidding developers from offering lower prices elsewhere, Facebook makes it hard for developers to draw users off Facebook. By charging a service fee, the complaint argues Facebook could make it "far more difficult, if not cost prohibitive, for smaller game developers to compete inside the Facebook platform against larger developers."

The largest developer is social games company Zynga, which will reportedly make its initial public offering soon. The complaint also charges Facebook with entering into an improper joint venture agreement with Zynga in May 2010, exempting it from certain terms to which other developers are subject. Zynga is the biggest social game developer in the country, with over 250 million people playing the games each month, according to the report. Only Facebook Credits are accepted on the platform.

"Though Zynga is a game developer, Zynga has developed a large enough customer base that it is the single company in the market that could conceivably compete with Facebook if Zynga chose to leave the Facebook platform and/or establish a new social gaming site," Consumer Watchdog's complaint said. "The agreement between Facebook and Zynga, if published reports are correct, would therefore constitute a conspiracy between competitors and further extend Facebook’s already overwhelming monopoly power."

The complaint also warns that while Facebook Credits are currently only used in social games, the possibility is high that the site will allow the currency to be used towards other kinds of digital goods, such as pay-per-view movies. Consumer Watchdog cautions that Facebook's behavior with Credits use in games could extend to these other markets.

“This isn’t just about fun and games,” said John M. Simpson, a consumer advocate, in the press release. “These activities in the virtual world are a big business, worth billions of dollars. If Facebook is allowed to dictate terms in the online gaming market though anti-competitive tactics, consumers will pay more and innovation will be stifled.”

Facebook is not the only web giant to face antitrust charges. Google, which just unveiled its answer to the social network with Google+, is also being investigated by the FTC for potential antitrust violations.

Gannett Cyberattack Targets U.S. Soldiers

By Jim Finkle

BOSTON (Reuters) - Hackers broke into a Gannett Co database containing personal information about subscribers to publications read by U.S. government officials, military leaders and rank-and-file soldiers, the media company said on Tuesday.

Gannett told subscribers via email that it discovered the breach of its Gannett Government Media Corp on June 7. It said it had previously notified subscribers of the breach via a notice on its website.

The attackers accessed subscribers' names, passwords and email addresses, the company said. They also obtained data on the duty status, paygrade and branch of service of some readers who serve in the military.

The information included subscribers to Defense News -- one of the world's most widely read publications covering the defense industry -- as well as publications aimed at soldiers serving in the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

Personal data on government officials and members of the military is highly coveted among cyber criminals because it can be used to launch targeted attacks against computer systems that hold classified information.

Hackers might seek to gain control of a government computer system through a "spear phishing" attack in which they send an email that appears to be from a trusted sender.

They seek to trick recipients into letting down their guard to download attachments containing malicious software or click on links to dangerous websites.

EMC Corp and Google Inc are among the companies that recently have fallen victim to highly sophisticated cyber attacks in which hackers accessed their systems via spear phishing.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Paul Simao)

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Foursquare Badges Deleted: Glitch Spams Users' Twitter Feeds

Foursquare users may be having a problem with their collection of badges, according to reports. 

Users on Twitter have complained about their badges suddenly being deleted, only to reappear all at once or in small bunches. When this occurs, users who have synced their Foursquare and Twitter accounts apparently get flooded by a spam-like stream of tweets about "new" badges--even though the badges have been unlocked already.

Is this a spam attack or a technical glitch? According to Foursquare, it's just a glitch.

"One of our badge servers has gone a little haywire. We're working on a fix now. (Don't worry, your old and new badges are in tact!)," said a tweet on the Foursquare support feed.

Indeed, some users on Twitter claim unlocking a new badge will sometimes cause several deleted badges to reappear all at once.

The Next Web purports that the issue may be related to Monday's database software maintenance.

The Next Web's Courtney Meyers was one of the Foursquare users whose Twitter feed was spammed with "new" badges. Take a look at her Twitter feed (below).

Google+ Social Network: More Privacy, Tighter Social 'Circles'

Google has finally launched its long-awaited social network, the Google+ project.

The Google+ network is designed around users' social circles (called +Circles) and lets users selectively share with specific groups within their personal network, rather than sharing with all their social connections at once.

The search giant emphasizes Google+'s privacy customizations and hopes that users will choose to use the new service over more established networks like Facebook and Twitter.

"In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who's in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share' box and you share with the whole world," Bradley Horowitz, a VP of product management at Google, told the New York Times. By granting the user more control over what is shared, how and with whom, Google+ attempts to make the online sharing experience more secure and more personal.

In addition to +Circles, Google's network will also let users add interests, video chat in groups, share content via mobile and many more features that should be familiar to social network users.

The search giant will integrate its new network directly into its massive web presence to allow users to socialize as they use various Google proucts.Mashable explains how Google will accomplish this:

The search giant's new social project will be omnipresent on every Google product, thanks to a complete redesign of the Google navigation bar. The familiar gray bar at the top of every Google page will turn black, and come with several new options for accessing your Google+ profile, viewing notifications and instantly sharing content at any time. The notification system is similar to how Facebook handles notifications, complete with a red number that increases with each additional notice.

Google is completing its field trial of the network, which is currently open only to a select few. However, you can visit Google+ to sign up, and Google will send you a notification when the service is ready. You can also explore the social network's landing page and to see what new features are in store.

Groupon India's SoSasta.com Leaks User Database

With hackers stealing and publishing private data every other day, the last place you'd expect a data leak to come from is inside a company. But according to a report by Australia's Risky Business, that's what happened on Tuesday at Groupon's India-based website, SoSasta.

Security consultant Daniel Grzelak claims he was searching Google on June 24 when he discovered the massive database, which includes the email addresses and passwords of thousands of SoSasta users.

"I started scrolling, and scrolling and I couldn't get to the bottom of the file. Then I realised how big it actually was," Grzelak told Risky Business's Patrick Gray, who estimates that 300,000 user accounts were compromised.

ZDNET's India IT blog reports that Groupon sent the following email to local users on Monday:

Over this weekend, we've been alerted to a security issue potentially affecting subscribers of Sosasta. We wanted to let you know that the issue has been brought under control and your accounts are secure. However, as a precautionary measure, we recommend that you change your SoSasta password immediately, by visiting the SoSasta website[...]

Please be aware that none of your financial information (Credit Card, Debit Card, NetBanking etc) has been compromised since this information is not stored on SoSasta, as per law.

However, writes ZDNET, the email apparently did not reach all Sosasta's users.

Groupon's U.S. customers shouldn't be affected by this leak, according to a statement Groupon sent to Risky Business. "Sosasta runs on its own platform and servers, and is not connected to Groupon sites in other countries," said the statement.

Grzelak noted to Risky Business that these accidental leaks occur fairly often, though not usually as large. He told risky business that he was searching Google on Friday for "publicly accessible databases containing e-mail address and password pairs," such as those that have been exposed in recent LulzSec hack attacks, among other security breaches. Grzelak has compiled a list of such information at ShouldIChangeMyPassword.com, where users can check to see if their personal information has been made public.