All Things Digital

Overseas travel to the United States has plummeted in the past five years, and it may well plummet further thanks to The Department of Homeland Security’s recently revealed border policy on laptops, iPods and other electronics carried into the country by travelers. The policy (PDF) is five pages long, but essentially boils down to this: DHS agents can routinely seize travelers’ electronic gear and keep it for as long as they see fit. And they can search its contents and copy and share them with other agencies. And they can do this “absent individualized suspicion.”

The policy–which covers “any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form” as well as “written materials commonly referred to as ‘pocket trash’ or ‘pocket litter’”–applies to anyone entering this country, including U.S. citizens.

Anyone who wants to, that is.

If only we could keep our right to privacy safely up in “the cloud: along with our data …

In a May 1995 memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave,” Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates declared that the Internet was the “most important single development” since the IBM PC, one that was fast becoming a global communications and computing medium. “I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance,” he wrote. “Now, I assign the Internet the highest level.”

Ten years later, he penned another memo–titled simply “Internet Software Services“–in which he warned of a “services wave of applications and experiences available instantly over the internet” that would reshape the traditional software business. “This coming ’services wave’ will be very disruptive,” Gates wrote.

And lucrative for those who were quick enough catch it. Salesforce.com (CRM), for example. Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN), as well. Not Microsoft, though. Fearful of undercutting its fantastically lucrative packaged-software business, the company has been slow to enter the “software-as-a-service,” or cloud computing, market. Methodical, but still slow.

Now, with Google’s business-level hosted applications (Google Apps) gaining traction, Microsoft is moving a bit more quickly. The company dropped the 5,000 worker minimum on its Microsoft Online Services offering today, expanding the availability of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Server Online to businesses of all sizes. Especially, the smaller ones for whom Google Apps had previously been the only option …

We don’t think it’s a competitor to Microsoft Office. It’s casual and sharing, and a better fit to how people use the Web.”

–Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, April 2007

We are not in this to get Microsoft. We are in this to offer more compelling choices for consumers and businesses.”

–Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s business software division, April 2007

Soldiering on in its quest not to compete with Microsoft’s (MSFT) core office-productivity software business, Google (GOOG) last night added another component to its Web-based productivity suite–Google Sites. Created from JotSpot, the hosted wiki platform Google acquired back in 2006, Sites is essentially a lightweight version of Microsoft’s business-collaboration program SharePoint. It offers organizations a means of instantly creating a wiki-style group workspace, in which employees can collaborate.

It’s another powerful addition to the Google Apps suite, which already includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, Docs and Spreadsheets and Page Creator. And it’s free. And if you think of “free” as a euphemism for “not robust enough for enterprise use,” you best think again. At least that’s what Google says, anyway. “The so-called lightweight cloud application isn’t for the non-power user,” Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, told News.com’s Dan Farber. “It’s actually for the power user. Today’s power users aren’t writing macros. They are ‘power collaborators,’ grabbing content from six different places in the cloud and putting [it] on a site and sharing it.”

What was that Schmidt said about casual users again?

The S3 service is great but this just proves you can’t rely on it, this is a major issue especially since it’s been down for so long. Way to go Amazon.”

–a post on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service forum

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered a “massive” outage this morning, impacting a number of businesses that rely on the cloud-based storage service. Twitter, Tumblr and AdaptiveBlue were among the more widely known services to be affected, although there were many others. “Amazing how many of the services I use are reliant on S3,” venture capitalist Fred Wilson Twittered this morning. “Stuff is broken everywhere this morning.”

Amazon (AMZN) was able to resolve the issue in a matter of hours, but its failure to inform its customers of the outage and its efforts to correct it drew some harsh criticism from users. “Amazon’s response was substandard in this case,” said one. “I should, minimally, see a message on the front page at aws.amazon.com when there’s a complete outage. Instead, I had to come into the forums to make sure it’s not just my stuff. Like others here, I have a massive number of files (probably about 125,000 audio files, around 1TB of storage) that are for various music libraries. So I have customers with sites that are only partially functional, and nothing to tell them. That’s unacceptable. And I know you can do better. I’m not looking for details of the outage, just an acknowledgment (again, front page of aws) and ETA.”

Said another: “It’s AmazING the fact of having no info on what’s happening. Absolutely unacceptable. Come on, people on this forum are all tech guys, so we understand that bad things happen from time to time. However, you MUST be transparent with your customers and give them details on what’s going on (yes, we want to know exactly what’s happening and not a standard response like ‘The issue is resolved’). In fact, it is not. So please, scale these complaints to the right person and post the technical explanation of the issue as soon as possible.”

The long-term shift toward Web-based software is apparently taking a bit longer than expected. According to a new survey from research outfit NPD, 73% of PC users have never tried a Web-based office productivity suite. And of those who have, only a paltry 0.5% have been impressed enough to abandon their desktop office applications.

“The survey results show not only that SAAS [software as a service] firms have a long way to go to build brand awareness and trust among PC users,” Chris Swenson, NPD’s director of Software Industry Analysis, told Microsoft Watch. “But it points to how powerful the Office brand still is, and how difficult it will probably be for most of these firms to dislodge huge swaths of Office users from the grips of Microsoft.”

It would seem, then, that while 90% of computing will someday reside in “the cloud,” as Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed, it isn’t going to reside there for quite a while. “Maybe in the next 30, but not in the next five,” says Burton Group analyst Guy Creese, who suggests consumer adoption of SAAS will follow a path similar to that of consumer adoption of electricity in the late 1800s. “If you look at the electricity-adoption curve, it mimics what is happening now,” Creese explains. “People made their own electricity for the first 30 years. It was only in 1910, when Samuel Insull began creating electricity holding companies, that businesses and people decided it was easier and cheaper for someone to take over the task. If you figure usable PCs were invented in 1975, we’re about 30 years into a 50- to 60-year adoption cycle. People move a lot slower than technologists want them to; that’s why I think Microsoft’s ’software and services’ viewpoint is the less exciting but more sensible one.”