I feel like people are missing some context here, this isn’t about Google Workspace vs Office 365. After the JEDI contract controversy, the DoD switched strategies to procure from multiple cloud vendors: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/release/article/268299...
Those costs are never taken into account. It's always the "low" price of licensing/use/dev that is looked at, and then... you have the regret phase. Which never end because "we already invested so much", and the famous "in the long run it will be cheap... oh wait, we have a newer offer"
How long ago was that a thing? I got in in the 2000s and there was only a single email system for the entire Army. 10 years ago they moved the whole DoD to DEE.
As an employee of a company where about 1/3 of our workforce have migrated to Google Workspace and the rest have not, I have a (pretty long) list of things that are a pain. Anything to do with sharing is awkward. Google Chat vs Teams is a headache. Lack of calendar integration is annoying.
Obviously YMMV, but I don't think it's as simple as you're making it out to be.
How do your Office users share files? At a previous employer they refused to migrate away from an ancient companywide network share, combined with people emailing each other QuarterlyReportQ42021_final_Fixed (7).docx. There was absolutely no interest from IT (which the company had recently outsourced) to actually facilitate migrating to a sane sharing model a la Office 365.
OneDrive. Enterprise deployments have something similar to consumer-grade OneDrive, but more enterprisey with compliance controls built in. And of course all the regular Office apps work well with it — it’s not just browser based.
It’s honestly pretty good. All the usual features are there — importantly, version history (no more Contract v15 FINAL.docx).
The key thing is it works with Teams and SharePoint and has collaborative editing, works in browser, desktop app, or phone.
They had an on-premises version of OneDrive too, not sure if that’s still a thing.
It’s not all a bed of roses. Gmail still feels nicer than Outlook web, but Outlook web is catching up. Collaborative editing feels much more robust in Google Docs. But the OneDrive client is way nicer than Google Drive (for me, at least).
I’d definitely say Google’s and Microsoft’s “online business collaboration” offerings are comparable. I suspect users will have preferences based on what they’re used to.
Of course, if your org uses both you’re in for a world of hurt. Email works well enough, but even calendaring has friction. Filesharing / chatrooms? Doesn’t interoperate well at all.
Which neither side supports fully. So now you're paying a software dev to integrate the two. And of course, they're not going to get recurring events implemented correctly, especially when some events are exceptions due to holidays or other scheduling conflicts.
Or protecting people from being killed. Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, and many others, mainly in Asia and Africa rely on the U.S. for their security. Not to mention the protection of international trade routes that feed billions of people.
Ukraine is certainly thankful for the weapons they've been getting from the West, primarily the US. I don't think their offensive would be even half as successful without the precision strikes enabled by HIMAR and the US's stockpiled ammo.
Yes definitely. However, in the case of the Ukraine invasion, I see a lot of the fault in the West too. Very much reminds me of the first US-Iraq War in the early 1990s.
So everyone is going to have to switch from Workspace to O365 email when they get promoted from E-3 to E-4? Migrate all the saved messages and presumably switch addresses? Isn't that a low level enough that it will apply to basically all enlisted?
No, they will just claim for months that they will automatically migrate your e-mail and then instead of doing that, they'll cut you off from your old account one day and you'll lose all 10 years of mail in it.
So glad to see this. Military IT has been atrocious. I viewed the Navy Marine Corp Internet (NMCI) as damn near treasonous levels of awful when I got out a decade ago and assumed little improvement with the way contracts are done and the entrenched vendors. Happy to see Google win this not just because I prefer the solution now to MS, but that some change is happening. I still can’t believe we spent $7T on the global war on terror and no one is asking questions.
I agree that military IT has been atrocious. I disagree that NMCI was "damn near treasonous levels of awful." NMCI was a large, Department of the Navy (DoN) -wide contract that had incredibly challenging tasks it needed to complete to be successful. The first few years were bad but it got better over time and, by the time the next transition was set to happen, it was running pretty smoothly.
When people complained about not getting the things they wanted, what they were really railing against was the fact that they didn't get what they wanted all the time anymore; the military grew accustomed to telling someone "I want X" and it happened, regardless of cost, lifecycle sustainment, security, etc. NMCI forced the DoN to develop and articulate requirements properly, write good contracts, budget for software and hardware sustainment, and generally operate professionally.
In short, I would take an NMCI computer and enterprise services from 2010 versus a Marine Corps Enterprise Network computer and enterprise services from 2022 any day of the week.
Disclosure: I have been a Marine Corps Communications Officer for almost 20 years; starting before NMCI. I worked at the regional and enterprise levels to transition ownership back from the NMCI program/contractor to government owned.
> . I disagree that NMCI was "damn near treasonous levels of awful."
In 2018 I was issued an NMCI laptop with a hard disk drive in it... with platters and a spindle and everything. Each time I powered it on I spent 20 minutes being serenaded by its deliciously clicky retro soundtrack as I waited for a desktop with a working Start menu (and I use the term "working" loosely since it took 5 seconds to appear when clicked). If I didn't have work to do it might have been comforting - it kind of reminded me of my old Presario V2555 from the late 90s. Constant McAfee updates and poorly-designed bespoke MFC management apps completed the aesthetic nicely.
"Treasonous" might be hyperbole but it isn't entirely unwarranted.
I have had similar experiences, however, it's important to be specific: the NMCI contract ended in 2010 and DoN moved to the Continuity of Services Contract where we bought services piecemeal until we could fully take it over. The Navy and Marine Corps tried to transition to NGEN during this time but mostly failed and each service ended up taking different paths. Now, the two services operate their networks differently: the Marine Corps, for example, runs it as a government owned and "shared operations" model where it's mixed government and contractor.
I imagine that the laptop you were given in 2018 was not an NMCI laptop, but instead a laptop from either the Navy or Marine Corps' new ownership/operations model which is incredibly flawed. Also, HBSS was poorly implemented in the 2010 time frame and Tanium was introduced (at least in the Marine Corps networks) around 2017. Both are major contributing factors to the issue you're describing.
In short: the current state is that computers are barely usable and that is not NMCI from yester-year.
This was 100% my experience. It was a standing joke in our Navy command of ~1200 people that the morning routine was to get into the office, type username/pw, then go get coffee and BS with co-workers for 30 minutes and by the time you got back, Outlook would just be finished coming up.
Not to put a fine point on it, but if you want to know what it was like back then, just say something like "I don't think we should finance the war in Ukraine. What is happening in Eastern Europe isn't our problem. Neutrality is the best policy" and see the rhetoric you'll hear. Usually blind allegations of shilling, being a Russian stooge, being a sock puppet, and so on.
It was several times worse in the early days of the GWOT. Sikh's were getting killed for looking too Muslim. The stuff you see now where people want to include mandatory "Fact checks" in internet searches sort of paled to the crap we saw in the GWOT of Extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, the Bush doctrine, destroying privacy laws in the name of patriotism, and so on.
> Not to put a fine point on it, but if you want to know what it was like back then, just say something like "I don't think we should finance the war in Ukraine. What is happening in Eastern Europe isn't our problem. Neutrality is the best policy" and see the rhetoric you'll hear
What's happening now is not remotely comparable to what the US did in response to 9/11 - if anything, it's the opposite (we are defending a country from being invaded for BS reasons vs invading another country for BS reasons)
At the beginning of the Iraq War, and for sometime thereafter, we were led to believe that Iraq was actively developing WMD. We weren't invading a country, but saving the world from imminent catastrophe at the hands of an unhinged and crazy dictator.
The proof included claims by dozens of different intelligence agencies, testimony from high level insiders in the Iraq government, surveillance photos of mobile biological weapons laboratories, definitive proof of purchase of Uranium for nuclear weapons purposes, under oath testimony, and of course endless propaganda:
To imagine all of this was fabricated or based on lies would make even the most enthusiastic conspiracy theorist look at you a bit funny. These events played a major role in shaping my worldview. And what we're going through today is even more extreme.
The one bright side of this is that if we can manage to avoid nuclear annihilation, I expect an even larger chunk of the population will join the jaded and cynical asshole family. It's not a pleasant worldview, but probably necessary for the survival of humanity in the age of mass media and mass weapons.
It was all based on lies and fabrication without any conspiracy. You are assuming it requires a conspiracy to pull it off, but why would it? These agencies, media and companies are all interested in the same thing which is US hegemony and profits not the truth, that automatically makes them do this without need for any conspiracy.
And why wouldn't they? What exactly has been the punishment for so called reliable media for spreading lies over and over again? If anything they are considered more reliable than ever. Which means people consuming it are not interested in truth either.
> You are assuming it requires a conspiracy to pull it off, but why would it?
Some might find it implausible the media and legislators were so credulous.
I mean, Saddam did allow UN weapons inspectors in before the war, and nobody could direct them to any WMD. Even at the time, it took some serious mental gymnastics to believe spy agencies had all this evidence of a huge programme, and yet couldn't direct weapons inspectors to anything.
Looking into the history of it, I don't think there was any sort of systemic conspiracy, but a loose collection of incentives.
If you wanted to sell papers, you needed to sell stories about AMERICA STOPPING TERRORISM! How did you get access to stories of marines busting down doors and shoving the foreign looking faces of murderous terrorists into the dirt? Well you had to be known as a news source who said the right things, had the right attitude.
At these news organisations there were some editors who were mostly there before 9/11 happened who decided that supporting America was the crap and were pushing stories from any reporter who had "sources" that gave evidence of what was going down. Readers LOVED reading stories about heroes who kicked the ass of murderous terrorists. It was a feedback loop, the more hawkish you were the more you succeeded, the more dovish you were the more irrelevant you were.
You can't seriously compare the assertions pushed through the media after 9/11 to the multitudes of sensory and social evidence that Ukraine was attacked.
I opposed GWOT / going into Iraq after 9/11, I have not forgotten the collective national mania.
But the comparison you're drawing to Ukraine is nonsense. If you're at the point where you believe all the reports, images and interviews detailing the millions of refugees crossing out of Ukraine have been faked... I'm not sure how to help you.
> If you're at the point where you believe all the reports, images and interviews detailing the millions of refugees crossing out of Ukraine have been faked...
I'm not comparing the worthiness of the two wars, I'm comparing the public excitement around the wars. I definitely am far more supportive of a defensive war than a pre-emptive war on general principle.
>Sikh's were getting killed for looking too Muslim.
I'm sorry but this sounds like an activist fever dream/urban legend. Are there actually two (or even one) known incidents like this from that time period?
I'm not defending the GWOT or opposing it here but that's an extreme characterization you're making; I was there and it doesn't match anything like my memory.
Here's a few murders: Balbir Singh Sodhi, Waqar Hasan, Adel Karas, Saed Mujtahid,
Jayantilal Patel, Surjit Singh Samra, Abdo Ali Ahmed, Abdullah
Mohammed Nimer, and Vasudev Patel.
Yes, but remember that the UN Security Council has a habit of fabricating evidence. Colin Powell was never trialled for showing “proof of WMD in Irak” and he died in 2021, with no penalty for his lies.
That happened with every recent war. It’s a habit of fabricating evidence, not mere clerical errors.
> Yes, but remember that the UN Security Council has a habit of fabricating evidence
The UN Security Council is not a singular entity, it's composed of permanent and rotating members, so it can hardly have "habits". A member can come with fabricated evidence, which can be accepted by other members for whatever reason, but that's not the UN Security Council fabricating evidence.
Crimea is almost exclusively ethnic Russian. This [1] is from the 2013 Wiki page on Ukrainian demographics. The annexation polls in Crimea from 2014 were not fabricated or coerced, and their results were subsequently validated by numerous Western polling agencies, including Gallup [2].
That's the entire question of this war (and the one entirely absent from Western media). After the Russian leaning government in Ukraine was overthrown in 2014, those heavily Russian territories declared their independence, starting a civil war. Numerous efforts were made to resolve this were made (the Minsk accords), but went nowhere. Russia blamed Ukraine, Ukraine blamed Russia.
So who gets to decide the fate of a people within an area? The people within that area, or the government with historic claims to the land of the area? That's not a rhetorical question because the traditional answer has always been the latter - generally changed only by war or collapse.
But I think it's an important and fundamental one that must eventually be answered on a global scale if we ever want a peaceful world. At what scale does the right to self determination and rule begin? Obviously a household shouldn't be able to declare itself independent, but a city? County? State? Region?
Crimea has become almost exclusively Russian less than one hundred years ago.
Like in many other regions of the Soviet Union, that was done by force, i.e. by deporting or murdering the native inhabitants.
After bringing Russian colonists in all those regions, the Soviet Union frequently did not need to spend any money for them, because the Russian colonists have been installed directly in the houses vacated by their former owners, who were forced to leave almost all their belongings behind.
So when now the Russians from such territories recently colonized by the Soviet Union complain that the natives do not love them, or that they are discriminated, or that some country wants to maintain control over the colonized territory, while they want to unite with the Empire which gave them the land and houses stolen from others, there is no wonder that such Russian desires are hard to accept for the neighbors of Russia.
Thank you for saying this. Not to derail the conversation bThisut for people who deny something like this happens, is still ongoing in Tibet where the Chinese have or soon will outnumber Tibeteans.
People blast America all the time for its handling of natives in the past, but China typically gets a free pass in the present even though it's policy is no where near that of America's while being much worse.
My point wasn’t that. It was Hawaiins are Americans. Tibetans are Chinese. They are both ethnic minorities within a broader country. While you can look at this in a negative light Hawaiian and Tibetan culture gets diluted by the bigger Anglo and Han influences (respectively) you can also see it provides benefits geographical/economical mobility that was previously not possible. While freedom of movement is not quite the same in China (because of houkou) as it is in the US there are still huge economical opportunities for Tibetans in the SERs of China (Shenzhen, Shanghai, Tianjin). There are huge educational benefits in Beijing, Wuhan, Guangzhou.
Yes the invasion of Tibet was terrible (as was the annexation of Tibet from China before that), and the destruction of Tibetan culture is perhaps even worse, the same can be said for all cultures that have fallen under the guns/germs/steel civilisations. Saying China or the US is bad is kind of missing the point… it would have happened anyway.
Your comment is certainly true, but I think quite misleading to anybody who might not know the history here. The group you're referencing at the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic group, that were exiled under Stalin - with no relation to Ukraine or Ukrainians.
Today more Tatars live in Crimea than before the exile. Well, at least in modern history, if we go back to times of the Ottoman Empire, things get much more complex. And Russia remains the home of the majority of Tatars today, where they remain a large ethnic minority.
It's an important issue and certainly ironic, but not a direct factor in the current conflict.
You are right that those evacuated from Crimea were not Ukrainians.
This is also true for other regions that belong now to Ukraine, where other nationalities, for example Romanians or Poles or Slovaks, were the prior inhabitants, before being deported or killed and replaced with Russian colonists.
However my point was not about the prior inhabitants, but about the current Russian inhabitants, who protest that nobody should do to them much less than their grandfathers did two generations ago to the natives, by robbing them at gun point of everything they possessed.
Unlike other people, like the Germans, who have paid heavy reparations to their victims, and who have presented solemn apologies for the acts of their ancestors, the Russians have never acknowledged any wrong doing.
To whom Crimea should belong administratively is debatable, but Russia does not have any more rights than Ukraine.
For the neighbors of Russia, a Russian-occupied Crimea or any other regions of Ukraine that remain occupied by Russia are a danger, because there is no sign that Russia will ever stop from its policy of territorial expansion that has been carried on successfully for centuries, with only 2 setbacks, when Russia, after WWI and after 1990 has granted the right of auto-determination to its larger parts, and it was very surprised when everybody opted out.
After WWI, Russia has succeeded to reconquer back in a short time some of the defectors, and after WWII it recovered not only all the lost territories but it gained many more others, plus the vassal countries that were nominally independent but in fact were open for pillage in unbalanced economic relationships.
While all the other European countries appear to have abandoned a long time ago the medieval ideas that the best way for prosperity is to use war against the neighbors and occupy their lands, the Russian dictators remain addicted to such methods, so they remain a danger for all the neighbors of Russia.
This is a thoughtful comment that shouldn't be grayed (as it is at the time of my reading).
But it doesn't answer gp. Whatever an enlightened political philosophy debate might yield, Russia annexed Crimea by force at a time when it was not theirs. Full stop.
However good Russia's case was or however much a majority of the inhabitants wanted control to change, control was ultimately changed via unjustified means that should be rejected by the international community.
The proof of Russia's lack of genuine interest in the will of those people is how quickly it came in to start shooting. You don't resolve national break-ups in weeks or months (see, for example, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia).
I would go back to the root cause there. World War 1 ended up with Brits and Germans killing each other because a Bosnian Serb assassinated an Austro-Hungarian Royal.
The Treaty of Versailles was nothing short of sadistic in the penalties it imposed on Germany which, shockingly, didn't result in Germany rejoining the modern world order (of the time) but growing to despise it even more. It is this which set the stage for the rise of a vegetarian artist who had a knack for oratory and riling up crowds.
WW2 was likely necessary, but WW1 was not. And WW1 created WW2. The worst part is also always the propaganda. When WW1 was being carried out it was being framed, at the time, as 'The War to End All War.' What cause could possibly be more noble? Of course it not only didn't end all war, but even directly led to even more war. And the fundamental cause of the conflict which initially triggered the war persists to this day!
> World War 1 ended up with Brits and Germans killing each other because a Bosnian Serb assassinated an Austro-Hungarian Royal
Russians and French died in much higher numbers on the Entente side than the Brits (who only joined due to Belgium's neutrality being violated anyways).
However, you probably know that the assassination of the morganatically married heir presumptive of the Austro-Hungarian throne was not the real reason for the war, only the spark that ignited the powder keg. There were many reasons and a lot of tension building for decades, starting with, funnily, Germany beating Austria which forced them to expand south, towards Bosnia, and also Germany beating France making the latter want revenge. The former pitted Austria-Hungary against Russia in the Balkans, on top of the many problems between the different Balkan countries. The latter made France eager for revenge and desperate to not be alone next time, hence it's cozying to Russia and the UK. Sprinkle an agressive German naval build-up that pushed the UK towards the Entente, German fears of Russian rearmament, Austrian fears of irrelevance, etc. and you have a powder keg with clearly defined lines just waiting for a spark.
For the Americans? I'd say their policy of being a "neutral" arms dealer mostly made the Americans a ton of money and rocketed them to global superpower status. Now Japan did attack them in a hostile action but America kind of pounded them after so I'm still not sure "neutrality" worked out so badly for them. If anything the Americans started doing worse and worse the more and more they got involved in wars halfway across the world.
For the Brits? Yeah appeasement was kind of a policy failure, Hitler turned out to not be the most trustworthy chap. I dare say Hitler was an unscrupulous chap.
dont forget the tax cuts and bailouts for big business that is added to the US national debt. currently at 31 trillion...but investing in education and healthcare for normal people is socialism
Both are direct expansions of the M1 money supply, which generally speaking will increase demand. Although sustainably stimulating the economy requires sustained investment on the supply side of the demand equation.
The government shut down businesses so it makes sense to compensate them. The government didn't force people to go the college or take out loans to pay for it.
Actually government does. It makes sense to nudge people towards acquiring more skills and they routinely do that. Also, the economy is punishing for those who don't have a college degree (it always was, but perhaps not at this level.)
And how did we reach here? Government policies. I am not saying that these policies were bad. But there can be no denying that government is the major reason why more and more people are going to college. And definitely, if college is not free or subsidised, they will be forced to take loans. Again, because economy is punishing for those who don't have a college education.
I agree the government does nudge people to go to college. The problem is there is a difference between nudging people and arresting people. Nobody is putting a gun to your head requiring you to go to college.
I agree the economy is set up against non college educated people. We should work to change that. Promoting trade schools as legitimate alternatives to college might help. I am not sold that would solve much though. A lot of young people don't want to get into the trades. How many 18 year olds who just graduated high school want to be a plumber?
One thing I will say is that I don't think it is solely the government to blame. Companies require degrees for jobs that don't need it. They probably do it since there is a massive amount of people with degrees so they may as well get one of them to work for the company. We need companies to step up and stop requiring degrees. At the company I work at there are people with degrees who are working in data entry.
The government didn't force businesses to take out loans either. Complying with the law doesn't automatically mean you deserve compensation.
Nevertheless, the government allowed businesses to take out loans, and in many cases forgave those loans, because it benefits the country. The government allowed students to take out loans, and in many cases forgave those loans, because it benefits the country.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be college loans. I am saying the job of the government is to help people, and both kinds of loans, an both kinds of loan forgiveness, fall into that category.
Correct. The subsidies were supposed to go for retrofitting builds, covering employment costs due to lower demand, and to cover costs due to being shut down. All of which were due to government policies.
==covering employment costs due to lower demand, and to cover costs due to being shut down.==
Except that there wasn't lower demand across the whole economy, only very specific industries. Most businesses were not shut down. Lots of businesses continued running, and had increased demand. They still got forgivable loans.
Perhaps the perception it has more to do with who signed the legislation (a Republican President and Senate) than whether it was actually "socialist" (it was)?
>Except that there wasn't lower demand across the whole economy, only very specific industries
Obviously some industries weren't impacted. Many were though. The GDP also declined.
You can probably say the same about every recession.
>Most businesses were not shut down
I never said they were. I've seen some estimates at 200,000 businesses. A huge number of businesses went out of business as well.
>Lots of businesses continued running, and had increased demand.
And lots of businesses who continued running had decreased demand.
Even if the demand remained the same or increased they might not be able to meet the requirements like outside eating or distancing which would limit their revenues.
>Perhaps the perception it has more to do with who signed the legislation (a Republican President and Senate) than whether it was actually "socialist" (it was)?
It is not socialist. Socialist can mean either state controlled or worker controlled. This is corporate welfare.
Just to be clear. I am not defending this policy. I am strictly saying that this is more justifiable then paying off student loans since the government literally shut many businesses and put other rules on businesses.
But they didn’t only give loans to business who were shut down. That’s the point.
You claimed businesses got loans because the government forced them to close. I am saying that plenty of business that didn’t close (and saw record demand) sought and received loans. Nobody made them take out PPP loans. Once you acknowledge that, it looks a lot like student loans.
It's quite possible that NMCI works just as poorly now. In my office we have desktops running Windows 10 on 8gb RAM and HDD (spinning drives.) It should surprise no one that Windows 10 has bloated beyond the capability of slow hard drives to keep up; I maintain maxed out disk read utilization at all times, and consequent here maximum number of browser tabs before lag kicks in is none. Outlook is even worse than Chrome (new official browser of DoD websites.) The fastest way to check email at work is to go out to my car and connect laptop via Hotspot for OWA. Next best way is to go home and use OWA there, with using the work computer the slowest option by about 10 minutes.
War on terror or war on anything. It's a complex thing. To hold on to power, a country must be constantly training their war machine. Wars are the best training for war. So say $7T is the cost of retaining power. What would the cost be of losing that power?
Despite this grim perspective, I have hope for the future of humanity.
Causing the deaths of 40-200 thousand civilians, thousands of our own armed forces and tens of thousands returning home wounded was just the cost of working that military muscle? Sorry but that's even more f'd up than the official reason we got told.
There is the false connection linking the Military with People. It is deliberately engineered to prevent criticism of the military.
There is also the idea that the "military" are not to blame for wars, wars are created by politicians not the military. The truth is of course that generals want to go to war because it keeps their budget allocation high.
These myths make it hard to both support Joe who's back from the war, and yet be anti the war in the first place. It's hard to mention that the overall military budget seems like a lot, without sounding like you're anti-joe.
Even something as simple as "thank you for your service" is in some ways a propoganda. To ask an ex serviceman about the point of the Afgan war, to ask them if 100 000 dead Afghans makes up for 3000 on 9/11, to question the logic of signing up to serve in an army currently fighting an unjust war, would seem antagonistic.
To question how Afghanistan is different to Ukraine would be unthinkable. [1]
In truth one can (and should) support veterans, but perhaps can also raise questions about the scale of US military spending, and question the wisdom of having an enormous standing military which needs to get involved in conflicts of dubious value, simply to justify its own existance.
[1] they are of course very different in a lot of ways, but in effect are the same in more ways we'd care to admit.
Have you ever actually tried to have such a conversation? You might be surprised at how many veterans feel about their time in Afghanistan or who they think really disrespected their service.
The short answer is "not a lot" - primarily because I think it's a conversation best had in person, not via forums. It's hard to create the nuance such a discussion would need when typing.
But, perhaps more to the point, it's not veterans that worry me. I suspect (as I think do you) that many are disillusioned with the real outcomes of the war. Just like those who served in Vietnam etc.
No, the people who worry me are the "politicals". Those who see _any_ criticism of the military as being anti-troops. (As noted above, this is expressly the outcome the military-industrial-complex has been working on forever.) And the messaging is so successful that, on either side of the isle, it's basically political suicide to "vote against the military".
While reducing the spending on the military may garner some support from those who have actually served (although I doubt in significant percentages) - it's the blow-back from those not actually in the military (military families, and everyone else) which is most concerning. There are not so supportive as those who are not actually doing any of the work or in any of the danger.
i have to admit it felt weird as a non-us person, when the airplane pa system mentioned, that someone from the armed forces was also riding along and calling out that person by name and the subsequent clapping...
I know I shouldn't type this but isn't it weird that Google remains the last tech giant that hasn't had a major breach. I mean small breaches based on CSRF issues and what not, but nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by. Probably part of the reason the Army chose Google.
I think I would normally disagree with a govt. agency using a cloud platform, but it might actually be MORE secure than what they can do themselves.
China broke into google and surveilled targets. Like, actually spied on dissidents through their gmail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
This greatly sped up projects to protect user data from external threats.
Heather Adkins who leads security (and is one of those ultra-longtimers) brought a number of senior eng for internal, ultra-private meetings where they showed the eng leadership exactly what had happened. I wasn't invited but at that time, sat near the exit door and their faces were just ... aghast at the consequences of what had just happened as a function of the systems they built.
The snowden dumps also showed that the NSA had packet traces of BigTable RPCs which was quite an eye-opener and definitely sped up privacy projects.
In 2002, Code Red mostly brought down the Internet. It was big news then. I can't imagine Microsoft could survive that happening today. Either way, making it sound like something that happened so few human years ago in either case deserves more reflection.
I knew wikipedia was going on a dangerous path, but I didn't know they had fallen so low. I'm talking about calling the entities involved in that affair as "belligerants" and also having the lack of tact of writing about "Casualties and losses" (in a non-ironic manner, I suppose).
China breached Google a while back. The NSA also hacked google wide open by decrypting/man in the middle SSL/TLS. I remember when that was disclosed Google went on a rampage implementing site-to-site/machine-to-machine SSL so that it's not relying on single point of failure SSL/TLS termination.
A lot of people have selective memory when it comes to security issues.
And those breaches are multimillion record breaches.
The China one was bad enough for google to terminate the entire link to china and pull out entirely.
From my read of the NSA sections of the snowden docs, they didn't decrypt anything- they observed the Google front end that talked to the user was the end of the TLS chain and from there, inside Google's networks, the front end talked to its backends without any encryption, so as long as you had physical access to Google's network (which included intercontinental fiber) you could trivially sniff packets. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
I can't find the article now but it had a picture of an NSA presentation with what was obviously a bigtable RPC (spend enough time debugging protocol buffers and stubby). From what I can glean, it seems likely that they tapped an undersea cable carrying Google's traffic between a frontend and a backend, although that's speculation.
They did both. They tapped private inter-DC fiber of Google's that wasn't encrypted. Additionally they had a cute hack that could crack Diffie Hellman at a cost of about $100M a prime (and most of the internet at the time used the same primes). So most TLS/IPSEC/SSH etc was wide open to them too if they could catch the handshake.
Can you point me at the DH crack? This?
https://www.theregister.com/2015/10/19/nsa_crypto_breaking_t...
I don't recall that ever being associated with breaking Google traffic although I recall there were some Google SSL changes around the time which may be related. I simply haven't seen any direct evidence, while a packet dump on a slide is direct evidence.
Risky Business posited last week on their podcast that since Operation Aurora[1], where China hacked a bunch of companies, Google has just pulled out their checkbook to ensure that it never happened again. And it seems like they have successfully done so.
Amazon has a history of employees within the company leaking large sets of customer data, or using their internal access to target vulnerabilities in customer AWS setups. As far as I know they haven’t had any breaches by non-employees, but major internal data use issues are still security problems.
Apple only has if you count exploits that allow for hacking Macbooks and Iphones as far as I know (and I wouldn’t count that personally).
If by hacked you mean high profile users/public figures without two factor enabled and using passwords that could be guessed by just browsing their social media footprint... then sure, they were "hacked"
I don't think there was a technical vulnerability , my understanding was there some social engineering and poor security defaults that led to some high profile accounts being compromised.
Yes poor design from Apple, However if your account had a long random passphrase and not something from your life[1]
would it then have not been possible to compromise right ?
I mean if users followed best practices it won't have been possible [2]
---
[1] which could be known more easily than if you are a celebrity
[2] Not trying to defend Apple here or absolve them of responsibility, but trying to differentiate a product hack (design choice and social engineering) from a pure technical compromise like a RCE or speculative execution which is developer purview and more interesting.
> I know I shouldn't type this but isn't it weird that Google remains the last tech giant that hasn't had a major breach.
> nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by.
Why do you think that? Google has had several major breaches.
There was a google+ bug that exposed info on 52.5 million users, one on 500,000 users' data, and other disclosures. There have also been corrupted apps on the play store, like Brain Test that infected at least a million devices with difficult to remove malware. A decade ago there were about 5 million Google passwords leaked online.
It depends on your definition of security. I go with confidentiality, ineltegrity and availability.
They continue to fail badly on all three of those fronts from an end user perspective. However, most of their problems on that front are self-inflicted / intentional cost saving / revenue generating.
Edit. Examples:
Sent box message injection in gmail getting (edit: people) fired. People sneak a forged sexual harassment message (or whatever) to the victim past the gmail spam filter, put the victim's address in the from header, and then corporate IT checks the account, sees the "outgoing" message in the victim account and fires the victim.
Google drive data loss (many examples in web search results).
Permanent account lockouts through no fault of the end user.
Ignoring all the other un-parseable gibberish, the fact that messages get sent-foldered based on their apparent sender is a feature that enterprise customers demand and pay for. Gmail also maintains and exposes delivery audit logs so there is never uncertainty about the provenance of such messages.
The firing scam worked about a decade ago. Audit logs would fix it, assuming the company knew about them.
Alternatively... They could just not route inbound messages to "sent".
What possible reason would enterprise customers have to demand that certain incoming messages get black holed into a folder that no normal user will ever look at?
It’s not necessarily moronic. If a tool can send email as you, it makes sense and is convenient for it to appear in your Sent label. And if you are using Gmail as your “system of record” it becomes a legal necessity.
Google itself uses gmail in both of the ways I mentioned.
That's just bizarre. It doesn't really contradict my point that they're not providing data integrity to end users.
Personally, I'd be pretty pissed if a tool injected into my sendbox instead of sending an (optional) copy of whatever it generated to my inbox.
On the other hand, I know how to set up filters.
Anyway, it has been a half-decade since I gave up on figuring out what fresh UI hell gmail has shipped each year. (I autoforward whatever must be sent to gmail elsewhere, and set up a logical contradiction email filter to nerf their broken and mandatory spam filter).
I guess if random systems are sent box injecting me, then I'll lose the emails. Oh well.
It sounds like there are third party G Suite tools that force you to enable delegated access (from the article, it is unclear if this is possible for personal accounts).
On top of that, some manage to enable it without prompting. Yet, somehow, Google let them keep their API keys.
Google just posted a 5 part documentary series on IT security within Google and covers their response to operation Aurora. It’s pretty light on technical details but is a fairly entertaining watch.
No reason to really consider that as relevant here since if you consider it then you also have to consider that they’ve breached not only every potential contractor for the USG but also any company that matters.
I love the idea that the USG has simply backdoored Google, because it implies 1) a covert team of google3 shadow contributors, which is kind of funny and it must suck for them to not have platform support, but also 2) that the team responsible for micromanaging every joule that their datacenters consume, and charging back to every product group for resources used down to the nanodollar, simply hasn't noticed this ongoing campaign of bulk access.
I mean every big tech company of course: Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, etc. but also they're going to have backdoors into companies like Boeing or perhaps 3M, banks, etc.
"Matters" in this context was related to national security concerns.
I don't hold that one against them... they were not a willing participant in it, and at the time one wouldn't have reasonably included that in a threat model (and still isn't a part of a threat model for most people), so I wouldn't say they were negligent either.
Part of why this doesn't happen is because if someone were to hack Google and they got caught, Google will simply disable all their services for that person.
Late last year Google got FedRAMP High certification for Workspaces and Public Cloud. What this means is that, rather than have to use a "Government" version of Office365, and a "Government" version of AWS, and potentially even other versions for contractors, you can instead just use regular Google services for everything, at the highest levels. Managing different vendors and products and clearance is a nightmare. This is a potential game changer.
No no no no no. This is not true. Google Workspace is FedRAMP compliant for government customers. It is NOT possible to configure Google Workspace in a FedRAMP compliant way as a regular customer. You can't even get NIST 800-171 on Google Workspace without additional tools.
Yeah, and the whole certification process is way more complex than that. To use the example I’m familiar with, Azure as a whole is FedRAMP High for all US regions. However, if you need to you need to handle DoD IL5 data or justice data, you need to go to Azure Government because they have even stricter personnel screening requirements than FedRAMP. Except the DoD didn’t like sharing a region even with other US Government customers, so there are also a exclusive DoD regions as well.
That’s not because Microsoft is trying to market segment. Turns out different parts of the government love making things hard on their suppliers by insisting they are special. I seriously doubt google actually manages to negotiate the minefield that is contracting and CISOs with conflicting requirements like the GP is dreaming of, but cool if they can.
It looks like two provisions it doesn't natively support, but you can slap on a 3rd party tool and you're in business. This is still much better than using two completely different vendors for your collaboration and cloud tools.
So the Army uses it but if you're a government contractor you can't use it because you can't get a NIST 800-53 or CMMC compliant configuration on Workspace...
Before anyone tells me that Workspace is FedRAMP compliant: Yes, I know, but they do not expose the controls necessary for non-government users to be compliant.
For those of us who are not well versed in these standards, could you describe, or just bane, some crucial parts that would be needed for compliance but are missing?
This stuff can be dangerous. My son asked me a question in chat and my phone somehow auto-responded a "No" answer. I'm guessing I put my phone in my pocket without locking it. Luckily I caught it in time and as soon as that happened I disabled all auto-responding features.
If they run their algos on anything grunts are uploading it’s going to cause some headache. My ex-Marine friends claimed there was crazy stuff on the military share drives that were accessible by anyone on the network.
Does anyone actually think this is endorsement? At this point Google is the 2022 version of 1998 Microsoft. Big, slow, and dumb. We all know we're getting fucked by them yet not hard enough to quit yet. Soon.
No company today has the level of consolidated power over the computing industry that Microsoft had in the 1990s. It's actually hard to imagine now, when the situation even at the very top of the industry is so much more competitive.
It's almost like saying "Donald Trump's presidency was just like Josef Stalin". Sure, there are bad things but if you seriously look at what was going on, there was just a whole different level of badness.
Doesn't sound like an endorsement to me. They needed 150k email-only licences to bridge until they can replace contract they buy the rest of their Office 365 licenses on. Google showed up with an bid they couldn't refuse. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a loss-leader for Google (or an "investment", as we call in the defense business).
In same vein some e-commerce sites and payment processors secretly distrust commercial email services and don't tell you that they've blacklisted your email provider.
You go to make a car or flight reservation, enter all kinds of info including your credit card, and then bam, it says "Oops, something went wrong, try again later". Or an e-commerce site asks you to enter your email and they'll send you a confirmation code, but the confirmation email never comes.
I've determined by experiment--using a different IP but a Gmail email address--that a frequent cause is a secret bias against commercial email services. It's particularly infuriating because I think a commercial email user with a paid account is a much lower fraud risk than a free Gmail user.
Are you using a personal domain or one of theirs? If it’s a personal domain, make sure you have all of the DNS records set properly to make spam filters happy.
If it’s one of their domains, not sure, but I’d guess their free accounts originate a bunch of garbage due to the nature of their service.
Yeah, definitely not in total volume, but proportionally I suspect it’s a good amount. Not because PM is bad but because gmail is ubiquitously mainstream.
I mean, there’s some reason you’re being sent to spam. And it’s not anything about PM’s configuration, they use solid defaults that should make default spam filters happy.
Doesn’t the rest of the DoD uses Office? Is this not going to cause a bunch of interagency drama from having to convert documents from Docs to Office? (or is there some big button you can press in the GSuite admin console to say “make everyone save everything in Office format, yes, I know some features will work weird.”)
I used to work for a big international company (+100k employees) that heavily used and depended on MS Office and migrated to Google Workspace. There was a lot of hesitance on the migration and also keeping the users engaged using it (I think that most of the people can not even imagine that there is something else besides Word and Excel) and it was one of the most successful decision I had seen for the users.
There is this irrational fear to stop using MS Office and to me the fear is now having to use it. I am not working with that company anymore and having to deal with Office again has been painful.
I just took a new job at a company that uses Workspace and it drives me nuts for two reasons. The biggest is that Sheets is awful compared to Excel.
The second is having work in a browser tab. It’s so much easier to keep things organized when switching around between programs when you have an actual app.
Most operating systems let you use selected web sites as faux apps, and they get their own window and taskbar icon etc. it’s great for me to have GMail have its own window instead of buried within Chrome
The Google article links to the Army CIO’s post on this. He responded to a similar comment with the following
“Google Workspace does not replace Army 365. The Army has the world's largest Office 365 implementation with over a million users. This capability serves a niche user base with a unique set of requirements and complements our enterprise capability through Army 365. This is why we had the endorsement and support of the DOD CIO.”
Also, the current vision is to serve people with very limited needs (recruits in basic training is a prominent example). Seems like a heck of a negotiation lever though.
The important people will still have office. MS just wanted too much money for office365 licenses, so a bunch of lower enlisted just dont have email right now (because of no licenses). This will bridge the gap.
With the amount of restrictions, custom add-ins and specific workflows, it wouldn't matter that much since it's not even inter-office-compatible. Documents that need to be shared externally are generally converted and exchanged via a portal that does the actual release afterwards. For most documents that don't allow editing and only do form-filling after the fact they seem to prefer PDF over everything else.
I suppose the online variants of everything (with PWA support that is) all have the same benefit: easier to stream incremental changes to all users, and easier to centrally manage workflows and access control. Because nothing needs to be re-evaluated locally, you are only left with on-line verification and CAC verification/signatures.
The reporting is that they are using it for junior personnel who don't use collaboration feature regularly, just email for receiving (and occasionally sending) official communications. The idea is that anyone who would regularly needs collaboration capabilities gets an Office 356 license.
The perfect Wearable for the U.S. Army in the field is a ruggard Pixel device that dual functions as ceramic body armor plate in front of the heart but is dust and waterproof, floats like a kickboard, and the keyboard slides out HTC style as in the early model Nexus devices with a trackball to the side.
Integration between systems is not important. They SAY it’s important, but the current state of 8 different solutions for every need that are deployed say otherwise.
It is a weird choice, especially considering how every computer assigned to an end user is a Windows Desktop, Especially Widnows 10 as of 2017 - https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2016/05/10/
I can see how licensing for Office is "expensive" but this is the DoD so that should be the least concerning issue.
Training is touched in the PR, but, it is not 1:1, especially for excel spreadsheets with macros, pivot tables or integration to PowerBi, which again is Office 365. I doubt FPA/Accounting and such are going to move over to Google.
For tech, same ,I don't see it happening. I could see an excuse as "more secure" as the identity is entirely cloud based, and you don't need to label/track content via Azure AIP/DRM'ish and it's easily accessibly within google, but that is entirely possible on O365 after it's tuned for that. I also am curious about general mail routing and such, no more exchange? No more outlook? (Well, I guess you could use outlook via imap, but then again what's the point?)
This PR just has me asking more questions, especially since all of the options AFAIK for gsuite require an active internet connection and a modern/newer browser. The same org that uses Panasonic Toughbooks, is going to have a have to use an "offline" mode of gsuite.
This is almost certainly a proof of concept based on language in the PR. The Government should always keep a pulse on the market and be willing to buck the status quo. Office is the standard now, but GSuite could be so in 15 years.
God I hope not. GSuite is a resource hog, well almost any webapp is. Also, it makes it more insecure. It is always better to have native apps that work off-line than a webapp
Office can work in an airgapped environment, anything using Google Workspace can be compromised over the Internet. (I presume the Army is a big enough deal they could get a private network link to Google, but that still isn't an airgap.)
I work in a company that has forced Workspaces upon us and it randomly is a nightmare. Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there. It is a complete nightmare adjusting access to random files. You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.
Ugh. Everything being browser based with crap desktop clients is the worst. They also want to constantly share crap via Google Drive and, unless I have missed something major, you can't run Google Drive, in Windows at least, under multiple signed in users with the same drive letter. You'll just get access denied errors. THAT makes shortcuts and all a complete fucking nightmare.
I have to often shrug when my users have issues and send in a report to the Japanese head office and hope they respond timely. I know /that/ isn't a workspaces fault, but it just compounds things.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. I have to deal with Outlook at work and it is hot garbage. I can't believe this competes with a web application from 2004. Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work). Trust me you have it good. We do not even have Office 365, so our 'sharing' options are SharePoint. I would love to have Gmail for work.
> Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work).
If that's the case, there's a pretty decent chance that you just have relatively novice spreadsheet skills/needs, so a basic tool will satisfy you (e.g. you're not so much evaluating your tools, but yourself). I'm not saying that's actually the case, just that "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.
> "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.
I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.
On the other hand, if you receive the opinion of some self-proclaimed expert, I think you're receiving less useful information. Experts are typically a small percentage of the userbase, and among experts there can be vastly different opinions depending on their specialty. Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.
>>> Yes, I get desktop Excel but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in Sheets (I use sheets a lot outside of work).
>> "it works for me" gives very little information about the software you're using.
> I don't think so. It says that the software satisfies the basic requirements of its target audience, and gives a hint as to who that audience is.
No, not really. What's the "target audience"? The GGP certainly doesn't say, and wrote a comparison that is meaningless unless you're already very familiar with the software (transforming it into a statement about the particular user), and perhaps misleading if you don't. I could say the exact same thing as him, except about MS Paint, e.g.
Yes, I get desktop Photoshop but I have never had to use any feature in it I couldn't get in MS Paint (I use MS Paint a lot outside of work).
Does that say MS Paint is a powerful program, or that I'm an amateur user? You can't really say unless you already know the programs, since I didn't say anything about the kinds of graphics work I actually do.
> Ask an Android dev to review vim, and an operating systems dev, and you'll get wildly different responses. If you ask a generalist software developer, you'll likely get less noise.
No, you won't get less noise, you'll just get different noise.
There are some cases like accounting departments that may definitely need the extra features from Excel. I guess I weigh the collaboration features Google provides over the extra features Excel provides. Google is still playing catch-up with Excel and probably always will be
But Microsoft is a decade behind Google in basic mail management.
You don't even have to get that fancy in Excel before Google can't keep up.
But there's an even more basic problem - trading documents with Excel users. Trying to round-trip anything more than a simple data-only Excel doc through Google Docs is folly, especially if you keep passing a document back and forth.
In case it wasn't obvious, I have to use both. I have multiple external vendors where emailing Excel docs back and forth is how you do business. Internally, we're Google Docs, except where we're not, mainly anything that touches Finance or Legal. But the Windows IT folks also use a lot of Excel. And, you get the idea.
In conclusion, the idea that anyone has a "solution" that is supposed to actually solve "sharing" is hilarious.
Power Queries is sorely missing in Sheets. There is no competition. The one area Google does better is in real-time collaboration. Also finding where a "file" exists in order to manage it is lacking in GWS.
I'd argue that Gmail (user interface, features, and performance) is the best part of Google Workspace and competes very favorably with Outlook. Excel, on the other hand, is a league above Google Sheets when it comes to performance and advanced features, although Sheets has a few unique things too. They both have their strengths and I'm happy to have the competition to make both better.
I won't argue that Excel is great. It is by far Microsoft's best product. It is an amazing accomplishment. Google has been able to do 85% of it and also added some great collaboration features. Yeah, it's not as good and probably never will be. No one will ever be on par with Excel. But the rest of Office is pretty bad.
It's hard to quantify exactly but Google sheets has nowhere near 85% of the features of MS Excel. Maybe 40%? There's tremendous depth to Excel which most users never touch, but which some of us absolutely need.
The latest release of Excel seems to be fully caught up to Sheets on collaboration features. We can save a file on Teams and then have multiple users editing simultaneously through a mix of desktop, mobile, and web clients it works really well.
Interesting, I realized after reading your comment that I had mentally parsed the above comment as meaning "85% of users have every feature they need" (and presumably some non-zero but decreasing percentage of the features the others need), but looking back I see that's not how it's phrased. It does make me think more about how "40% of features" versus "85% of features" should be interpreted though. Even assuming that there's agreement on what counts as a single feature versus multiple related but separate features (which isn't a guarantee), should every feature be weighted equally? I could see it being more reasonable to weight features by how necessary they are or by how much they're used; is the ability to do something very basic that almost everyone needs like summing a range the same "percent" as something more esoteric (I'm not a spreadsheet power user myself so I'm not sure what would be a good example here, but maybe calculating a regression of some obscure function class)?
google sheets (and microsoft excel online) aren't even close to the capabilities and speed of navigation of desktop excel. Like it is night and day if you are a heavy heavy user of excel. I'll admit some of what I've built up over the years would likely be better done in some combination like python and a database, but that's another topic for another day.
Google Sheets is wonderful in countless ways. It’s so handy to have multiplayer spreadsheets. But anyone who thinks it’s a drop-in replacement for Excel is a fool.
I strongly prefer Office to Docs except for multi-user edits. Office on the web absolutely sucks and is miserable to use while a team of people is editing away IME.
You can be using your Excel windows client to edit a sheet, while someone else is editing on a web browser, while someone else is editing on an iPhone, while someone else is editing on an Android phone, while someone else is editing on a Mac.
Sheets is cool, but, Excel and Word and Office365 are streets ahead of Workspace from an enterprise point of view. I've been a staunchly non-microsoft guy for years. When I was younger I was the guy writing it at Micro$oft or more likely Micro$shit. These days, managing multiple companies, some of which use Office and some which use Workspace I cringe when I need to deal with issues on the Workspace side. There are some things which Google does better. Generally APIs for the Office365 products are not as good as the APIs for the equivalent Sheets/Docs/etc product. I've done some fun/funky things with using Google sheets as an adhoc database. Put a "job" in a row in a Sheets sheet and a few minutes later something does your task and you can see the result in that sheet. Super easy to do with Sheets API, I've tried for years to get similar CRUD to work on Excel API and always hit roadblocks.
Office365 APIs for user management and groups and all the "AzureAD" stuff is absolutely top-notch.
Anything Google Cloud or cloud related, google wins hands down.
Cool I should give that a try. But a decade ago that didn’t exist and for undergrad and grad school Sheets was amazing. I almost did my dissertation in Docs but decided to use Pages instead (which was simpler than Word but a few times lacked what I needed… if I could do it again I’d of used Word)
A decade ago is a long time in tech. Which to be blunt: Should never color your opinions about technology today. Sheets was really neat a decade ago, but is just basic competency today.
Sheets has had almost no updates for the last 10 years after getting to its current level of viability. I'm reminded of this 7 year old talk (You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky) where he goes over a bunch of great Excel features that still aren't in Google Sheets today.
When the original dev team moves on to other projects, the new guys just make minor tweaks and no major product changes happen. Big new feature releases do things like "we moved this tool from the edit menu to the file menu".
And yet, somehow, some amazing features have been added to Excel recently. Dynamic array formulas and lambda functions have taken my Excel use to the next level. Let alone new standard functions (e.g. sort, filter, misc. text-manipulation functions).
Excel has had ability to edit same document by multiple people at the same time for at least 20 years. And is in process of discontinuing that feature.
I mean, like I said, a lot of the complaints I have aren't really the fault of Workspaces.
We actually use the multiuser functionality of Sheets a lot but I still run into constant issues. And the fact a huge chunk of this crap does /not/ play nice with /multi-user local workstations/, in 2022, drives me bonkers.
As a longtime user of both Microsoft Office and Google Suite, I will pick Gsuite over Office in an instant. Microsoft is security theater at its worst. You can never tell where your file lives. Is it on OneDrive or Sharepoint? How many links or direct access thingies has shared the file? Who actually has access?
Everything you wrote doesn't even register as negative against the wall of unimaginable pain of using MS Office 365 with its "collaboration" features that are based on SharePoint.
The first hint is that "business" OneDrive accounts take you to <org>.sharepoint.com instead of onedrive.live.com like personal accounts. They're meant to look similar but often work differently, unlike Google's personal and business Drive which are effectively the same thing.
Sharepoint frankenstein is the perfect way to describe o365 actually lol. All the images you post to teams, onedrive, where you save your cloud documents, all Sharepoint under the hood.
Excel desktop and web client are still a mess. One of the more common use cases IMO is nothing more than a table with filtering applied. That DOES NOT WORK with Excel under their Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) offering. Data simply won't match up and can easily be lost upon modification where what you see is NOT what you get. For that single reason I dread M365. *It has been like that for over two years and counting, multiple documents and less than a hundred rows and a handful of users.
This has not been my experience. Not only does filtering work, but in multi user documents it allows you to select user specific or document specific filters, so each user can filter separately.
It's not perfect, but most of the time it feels like magic.
I’ve been using excel online since 2020 and have numerous spreadsheets with pretty complex tables, filters and pivots and it works properly. And of course data matches up.
It is annoying that not all their features are available in browser, but I still prefer it over Google docs for anything other than lists.
Do you select the range and do Insert—>Table? Using an actual table is much better in Excel and the lack of this confuses me in Sheets but that’s probably just because I’m better trained in Excel.
> You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it.
That sounds reasonable to be honest. If someone leaves and has not left the files editable by others in a group... what's the other safe option? Someone has to be the arbiter of the permissions and the IT seems like a good choice.
Or your IT team can implement an offboarding process that does something reasonable here, like transfer ownership of any remaining files to the departing employee's manager. Or sequester them somewhere with specified access rules. Some version of this problem is present in any corporation but the right solution varies a lot.
Please show me teaching proper permissions discipline to a company that goes from 5 to 500 employees and ret-con it to all of the older files like that random spreadsheet the former head of HR shared with legal with various employee PII on it such as SSN, Salary, Sexual Orientation, Name your most sensitive employee data etc on it that IT now sees / owns.
I can assure you that some asshat HR dude has dropped the “Gay Employee PII DRAFT2 Pre Final.xlsx” on his home drive or saved it to a public folder while trying to email it to his Yahoo account to work on it at home.
There's always going to be a huge amount of documents and drafts that people don't want to publish to their team but still want to save. Occasionally there's value in mining through these after somebody leaves but it also creates a privacy law nightmare since personal folders even at work can situationally count as personal information.
IT seems like a horrible choice; if they were paper documents left at a desk would IT take them over or the unit supervisor/manager? Almost certainly the latter. IT taking over business area responsibilities wherever a computer is involved rather than facilitating business units performing their work is almost always the wrong answer.
The comparison doesn't hold. Paper documents can be found by anyone, they get "open access" automatically, you leave them in your team's area, and the accidental losing scales differently (if you "lose" 1GB of paper documents, you notice).
> rather than facilitating business units performing their work
Sure, and the team which enables business units to deal with this internally is... IT. I'm not saying they have to deal with every single document, but if they enable this, they deal with things that fall through cracks.
fast forward 10 years, you have 300,000 documents that various folks have access to. Now IT is the arbiter of reading a 40 page document and deciding on the data sensitivity of it and granting or not access. Now a founder retires who owned the folder that contained HR + marketing docs and it reverts to IT and revokes access to all of it. Injoy.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here - what's the other option? You don't have to deal with every single orphaned document - just the ones where people request access.
When the founder retires and the files did not get shared before, how exactly do you want to deal with that? (context: we're in a situation where we already know the standard handover / permission granting procedures either didn't kick in, or failed)
These online doc systems seem to lend themselves to massive proliferation of orphaned docs that are still accessible, versus ones that go away as they're on machines. Similar to issues with the internet never forgetting. And because it's good at not forgetting you have a fight to delete docs vs fight to retain them.
I don't get it - you're saying that losing information when somebody leaves because they kept it their local drive is somehow better then temporarily losing access in a manner that is easily recoverable?
In many cases yes actually. Not sure if you've had the sad experience of your parents passing yet, but it's real work to clean up. Drawers full of documents, including a receipt for Gum next to one for the upgrades on the house (one is tax deductable when you sell their house one is garbage). Let alone the really embarrassing stuff you find in say your parents night stand or that photo album.
Now multiply that by hundreds of employees over years, add in 50 revisions and forks of documents, legal liability, etc. Yes it's a giant pile that just gets worse.
It's all tradeoffs and a problem you hit when you get older and bigger.
Depends where you're coming from. Our (small, but international) company's accounting system is built on Google Sheets, with python scripts to import bank data.
We started with Xero, but it couldn't handle our international books. For instance the NZ IRD mandates particular exchange rates, and weird tax regimes (looking at you, Canada!) were way beyond it.
Sheets means a server can securely update data remotely, and we can instantly share data with our accountants. It's a five minute job to build a sheet that mimics tax reporting forms, and you can do financial what-ifs without having to dump data to Excel.
I'm sure Excel power users will hate Sheets, but Sheets power users will hate Excel just as much. Oh, and let's revisit this after your SSD dies just after you'd perfected the ultimate data analysis formula.
Luckily no floppies. But the Japanese are obsessed with over utilizing spreadsheets and want to create ones with VBA scripts for inter office use that require multiple users to utilize at once and they share them out via google drive. And their macros and scripts have hard coded pathing (don’t get me started) so they are hunting for the same drive letter path.
It took me a week to convince them what was happening when they first tried doing some of this. Beyond the hard coded paths they also had inline kanji and it was breaking everything on our American systems. Like excel would detect a broken and just delete the vba bin from the xlsx. It was kind of funny.
How many $B has Microsoft made off of Excel formulas and keyboard shortcuts?
Not to say they aren't delivering value, but I work in a place where many people have only used Google Sheets their whole career. They can't imagine running a finance org any other way.
For drive letters, IMO it's wrong design of Windows. Network drives and some apps' driver letters are assigned to users, while physical drives (and emulated drivers) are machine-wide.
Google Drive's desktop sync app is the worst piece of software I have used in recent memory. It simply can not sync large amounts of small files in any reasonable amount of time (hours and hours for 20GB of files on gigabit ethernet), will randomly leave things out from the sync with no explanation, and burn up 100% CPU the entire time. And if you move the sync folder it will re-sync from square one.
The value of dropbox filesystem integration is huge (not a shill for DB). You can grep for stuff, do ordinary search, supply the files to any app that presents a file dialogue, etc.
Google drive files live in their own hermetic world. There is a desktop client but it doesn't reliably sync to the local filesystem; when it does most of the files aren't actually searchable so you have to do two searches if the file you want might be on google drive. So stupid.
Different accounts are hermitically walled off as opposed to the "different parts of the filesystem" way you can handle locally.
And even if you can somehow do everything inside the google drive, well stuff shared with you can't be part of your file organization like it could with dropbox or, you know, the filesystem. If someone shares a directory with you google drive still won't let you make it a favorite much less move it in with the rest of your files. No, it just keeps falling lower and lower in "shared with me" as other stuff is shared with you. Pathetic.
Web browsers are slow, filesystem browsers are fast and you can index them with programs like everything or egrep? Familiarity?
I detest using web browsers to manage files honestly. I have yet to see it done well, there's usually a notable delay to descend into a subfolder. It's an awful experience really.
Though you may joke, I 100% feel its likely someone from the CCP is going to try hacking someone’s account through social engineering. Which makes me wonder will the US Army store top secret files on their workspace.
Has anyone had issues with normal INDEX/MATCH stuff in Google Sheets?
I was actually OK with moving from Excel to Google Sheets since the coverage of functions seemed mostly ok, minus all the new cool shit they added in one of the more recent releases (XLOOKUP, etc) but I literally tried a trivial INDEX/MATCH with a simple 5x20 matrix of price values and literally could not get it to work even though the identical "code" worked in Excel.
Really, really frustrating. I was working at a hedge fund at the time and I was simultaneously working on a real time portfolio dashboard as a web app, and needed to also have a stopgap solution in the form of a spreadsheet for people to play with and debugging differences in Google's spreadsheet function implementations and Excel's was infuriating
I'm always impressed at how difficult the Workspace Admin Console makes doing literally anything. It's like I'm thrown into a database with an aggressively denormalized schema and expected to figure out how to piece together complete records by hand via queries.
Except that you can't query across anything, because that would be useful.
One of my "acid tests" for a well-designed UI is if integrates metrics with configuration.
For example, VMware will show cute little inline bar charts of CPU and Memory utilisation when browsing virtual machines.
Similarly, some firewall or load-balancer products will show "hit counters" or similar stats next to rules or virtual servers.
For the other 99% of products out there, it's up to the end user to manually perform the "join" by clicking around the GUI. There may be an API, or a scripting tool, but without fail these won't provide a robust link (a foreign key) that would actually make this easy.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic in Europe, Google and Microsoft are being removed from classrooms, governments, and military agencies in favor of open source private clouds such as Nextcloud with Collabora office. This is due to GDPR and data sovereignty. Private clouds is what these companies fear as features mature.
Superior data sovereignty and control of the environments is the driver. Some user features are inferior but are being improved with the participation of the user community that includes the IT staffs of the customer organizations who can create add on apps and pull requests to the main code base.
Great. We just finally got teams where it isn't complete dogshit and now this!
It's awesome that we funnel tons of money to tech companies instead of raising federal government scientist salaries to be competitive enough to just retain the expertise for ourselves!
Every time my brother in law who is an NCO in the Army comes to visit, it takes about 30 minutes for his laptop to boot up to the point he can log in to do anything. I'm amazed that this is acceptable.
This is a really really bad idea. The military should never be beholden to a corporation like this for basic day to day operations. It will bite them in the future and probably at the worst possible time.
It was never a pledge to not work with or for a military. The people who fought that are gone. Kurian has authority to cut deals and doesn't worry about memegen.
There are distinct limitations- there is a team that "polices" memegen and will send you (and your manager, and HR) threatening emails (including suggesting job termination) if you post something that's not very nice.
Back in the day somebody made a meme which had a D&D alignment chart for all the Google leaders- Vic Gundotra was Chaotic Evil, while Urs was Lawful Good. Had to take it down because an SVP complained.
iirc there have been protests by google's employees against working with military, but the company as a whole seemed to be trying their best to ignore it
That's gmail. Hardly similar to the IT control powerhouse that is Google Workspace (but as a SAML service provider, ie. their user auth is still handled on the backend by internal systems. They aren't moving user auth to Google).
It’s not surprising at all. Current administration has setup a revolving door with quite a few Google execs working in the administration. Eric Schmidt is known to have done fundraising in 2020.
If you are so inclined, I recommend you reach out to the United States Senate Committee on the Armed Forces [1]. I also would recommend, if you have the time, a well crafted freedom of information act request regarding this procurement [2].
If you find no malfeasance, you’ve still done your job as a citizen keeping government accountable.
Might greatly increase it's chances as the US government can say "nuh-uh-uh" on things concerning national security. While google is big, they aren't that big to shutdown the US army's internet.
US Military fights wars using powerpoint. Seriously. Every brief. Every situation deserves a presentation. So now it will be PowerPoint AND googles version
Command post includes a lieutenant making a mission brief or conducting training for a group of 20 privates. Privates are not often authoring power points, but they are definitely consuming them. Sharing isn’t going to work. Its going to be all email all the time.
Can we start a petition against Google? Surely we can get enoygh support from engineers and developers to get the message across that using Google services is a bad idea.
Systematic murder is an extremely profitable industry to be in, and companies are first and foremost proud to be making oodles of money. In a battle between Googlers who have the mistaken impression Google is run by good people and the Googlers who make the company tons of money by signing big government contracts, the latter will win every single time.
We’re writing to let you know that the Google Workspace Active
Conflict Service will be discontinued from noon today at which point
your access to your maps, targeting systems, intelligence feeds,
supply logistics and battle command will no longer be available. As of
that date, issued equipment will be unable to connect to the Google
Active Conflict Service and existing connections will be shut
down. After cursory deliberation it has been decided that customers
would be better served by partners (in Russia and China) which
specialise in this segment.
What do I need to do? We recommend that you take action urgently to
migrate your arse out of any theatre of conflict post-haste.
Good luck and thank you for supporting Google products.
