Google Docs Privacy Scare

Google has a certain bravado when it comes to how it runs its cloud based services. However they have recently suffered a privacy glitch that might make people think twice about the security and privacy of their information in cloud based services.

Google said, “We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document.”

This is a huge debacle for Google and they seem to be less than transparent about the impact. Google responded to a TechCrunch inquiry, by saying that it was an isolated incident affecting less than .05% of all documents. The damage may not be widespread, but it’s still an unsettling lapse in security.  

Google has a tendacy to keep these types of things very quite. Like when Gmail goes down it takes them forever to admit something is wrong. There have been several mishaps in the last year that should call into question Google’s coding and testing practices.

Google Apps Has No Future

For a little more than two years Google (GOOG) has been in the productivity apps business, trying to chip away at Microsoft’s Office dominance with over 500 million users. First they went out and bought a bunch of start-ups including Writely, Tonic, XL2Web, and JotSpot. Then Google gave them a new paint job and duck taped them together calling them Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

For the past two years they have been trying every strategy in the book to try and get traction in the market. First it was consumer free then it was an enterprise paid model. With all the P/R hype, all the data points to Google Apps being an utter failure. According to Compete, Google only gets 4M unique vistors to their Google Docs & Spreadsheets Web sites. Still the irony is while jouranlists were busy predicting web based apps would make Microsoft Office obsolete, they were busy typing away using Microsoft Word. Google even got on the feature treadmill and started banging out must have features like “print” and “charting”. Still no one is showing up to their party. Read more