Blog of Cheeky Geeky

Something new is happening at Microsoft. They have something compelling to watch. A new series of messages under the umbrella “Why Microsoft?” is making its way out into the Web. Here’s the first video I’ve seen; it’s three minutes and really interesting.

 

What I see here, as someone relatively new to Microsoft, is a valuable story being told about differences in philosophy between Microsoft and some of its competitors, in this case Google and Google’s apps/docs suite. There are stark differences.

 

Currently, there is a lot of pressure to save money and be more efficient, in business as well as governments ranging from local to federal. And it is tempting to save money by switching to Google Docs or Gmail or other cheap or free solutions. Open means FREE, right? (Wrong…what you save in dollars you might make up for in headaches.) And sure, I use Gmail, and it’s good enough for my day to day personal emails.

 

But from a public sector IT view at the proverbial 50,000 foot level (and this is what CIO’s should be thinking about), is Gmail or Google Docs or similar solutions really good enough from a privacy standpoint? For integrating with other solutions? For instances when programs or information cannot be stored in a cloud? For cybersecurity? For all the things one needs to truly make an enterprise work nowadays?

 

An anecdote. You can upload documents from Microsoft Office into Google Docs. But did you know that when you do that back and forth a few times, the formatting gets messed up, and things go missing? (Is that the kind of documents you want the FBI or the SEC or the NIH handling?) Where exactly are Google’s cloud servers, anyway?

 

I call this phenomenon “Document Infidelity.”

 

I’m not here to deliver a hard sell, but there’s definitely a cost to leaving Microsoft if you already use a lot of it. This blog post isn’t the right place to argue about all of that. But the really big question out there is, do people want to save money in the short term and take a long term risk on critical issues related to identity, privacy, security, interoperability, and others, or do people want to “double down” on Microsoft as a trusted partner in the future?

 

Honestly, I’m not behind this campaign at all, but my understanding is that there will be more where this came from. Looks like there is a lot more information related to doubling down on your investment at http://WhyMicrosoft.com and there are sites related to Cisco, Google, and Open Office.  

 

In the end, you’re the community. You’re the customers. What do you think?? Let me know. As I get ready to speak about Government 2.0, the Open Government Directive, and similar topics at an 1105 Media event on Thursday and at the Public Sector CIO Summit next week,  I definitely want to hear from you.