JP
At first glance, Google Apps for Your Domain looks fantastic for small to medium size businesses. It’s hard to pass on anything that’s free from Google. What can be better than free email, free scheduling package, free Office tools such as Page Creator, Writely and Spreadsheet? Well, the freeness in Google’s offerings comes at a price – privacy and flexibility. Before taking the leap of Google faith, take a close look at the privacy disclosure. Proceed with caution if you don’t see any immediate red flags popping up. I sure did after finding out that we must change our MX records to point to Google’s servers. Thank you, but no thanks Google.
Google wants Microsoft’s lunch, not to eat but to throw back into their face. As Michael Arrington of TechCrunch pointed out, “This is a bold move Google. They are striking hard at nearly $12 billion/year Microsoft revenue stream.” It’s clear that both companies are approaching this from different positions. So, it’s still yet too early to determine which approach will win, until Office 2007 and Vista hits the market and Google reveal more of its offering.
Zoho is also building a competitive online office suite of its own. I wish them the best of luck, going up against the two giants.
7 Responses to “Google Apps For Your Domain: Ready, Set, Stop!”
joe August 28, 2006
How did you expect google to handle mail for your domain without you pointing your MX records to them?
NeutralShawn August 28, 2006
In your post you write:
Neutral“Well, the freeness in Google’s offerings comes at a price – privacy.”
So what exactly are you worried about google doing with your private information?
I don’t understand your concens at all.
Arvind August 29, 2006
Thanks for your wishes, Vincent! We require lots of them from admirers like you :-)
NeutralJohn August 29, 2006
I concur with Joe. What were you thinking? How else is your domain email going to reach their mail servers. Maybe you should investigate how the Internet works before scaring people. Or is the Internet “a series of tubes” for you too ;)
NeutralVincent Nguyen August 29, 2006
Guys, all I’m saying is if you know your administrator of your company and trust him with your email accounts then this is fine. And if you can sleep at night knowing that the person you put in charge of your email accounts isn’t going to log into your account and read your private emails, then proceed. I’m not comfortable with that. Which is why this will not work for my business.
Second, if you’re a one person shop and don’t have the need to cater to users using Blackberry server or someone else preferring to use Good service to get their emails, then go with Google. Pointing your MX to Google, you will lose any and all flexibility. Not to mention, each account is limited to a fixed 2GB of storage. The last time I checked, my email is breaching 4GB.
NeutralB00MER August 29, 2006
Personally I think Google should change its Mission Statement to a quote from Cosmo in the movie Sneakers:
“There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/quotes
Analytics, Checkout, Now this, its nothing more than a magic crystal ball into any industry if you ask me.
NeutralChiddo July 25, 2008
Wow MX record change a security risk? LOL perhaps you need a good course on email delivery systems? Honestly if you are worried about where an MX record points for your domain then I don’t recommend ever considering external mail filter solutions such as MXLogic or Postini! Both very nice services by the way. Email by nature is very promiscuous if left unsecured by products such as PGP or similar end-to-end encryption tools. Its just text messages passing from one location to the next often through a series of relays which may or may-not be caching the messages. Personally I think googles approach is actually very sound and they have incorporated Postini as a backend solution for their premium service to provide many features such as email encryption and mailbox recovery. Email should never be considered private even if you maintain your own systems. If security of content for emails is a concern the email should be encrypted at the transmission point (Client application or Outbound Email Server within your domain)
On a side note almost every email system administrator can access your email account and emails on most systems.
It seems to me that you are just paranoid about something that you perceive as a threat which in actuality is just a product of your misunderstanding of the concepts and practices for email systems.
Neutral