Re: [tlug] Google Apps for Work

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2016-05-10 10:27 +0200 (Tue), Josh Glover wrote:

> Very true, with one potentially important caveat: Google almost
> certainly uses your data for things such as (but probably not limited
> to) AdWords....I would assume [it's] Google's quid pro quo for free
> access to their productivity apps is your data.

Well, we know they do this for e-mail. I'm not sure about the
"productivity" (ha ha, what a laughable word when that includes software
like PowerPoint) apps. Unfortunately for this vein of research, I run an
ad-blocker, so for me it's hard to tell.

That said, some of the caveats are just the nature of "cloud" (I am
pretty careful about what I keep on Dropbox, too, despite me paying them
$100/year), and I can think of plenty of situations where if you have
any sense at all you'd far rather your data ends up in Google's Giant
AdWords Database than some of the alternatives.

> I know that they charge for companies, but I don't think it is very
> much, and I still think all your data is belong to them.

No. Now I don't now how far this goes if you don't actually try to take
advantage of what they offer in this area, but Google's done the work to
allow companies to conform to things like HIPPA and the European privacy
laws while using Google Apps for Work. (And yes, it is pretty cheap;
$5/user/month or so and I consider it a bargain for most companies. I
say this from several years experience supporting SMEs[1] as my side
money-earning thing while I was conducting extensive research into the
subtle yet fascinating tactical and economic considerations of World Of
Tanks.)

[1]: Oh, God, did I really just start using acronyms like "SME"?
Shoot me now!

On 2016-05-10 17:42 +0900 (Tue), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Obviously I didn't mean values of "you" including *you*. :-)

Ok, fine. You're joining my mother in constantly telling me how
"special" I am. :-)


>  > That you don't make copies to give to people is a huge, huge
>  > feature, though it seems that most people don't understand that.
> 
> Do "most people" need to understand that? I mean, if you don't trim
> your email...

Yes, actually I think that they do. I think it's kind of like the
programming problem of aliasing in reverse. Stuff breaks because
people are working from wrong information.

Note that this is different from not trimming your e-mail responses.
(For which, by the way, Google is hugely to blame: I encountered a
message with--quite seriously--1800 lines of appended "context" the
other day, and that convinced me that Gmail utterly violates Google's
alleged "do no evil" policy to perhaps a greater degree than anything
else they do.) But the non-trimmed quotes in e-mail are just "junk"
data that shouldn't be kept, but that nobody relies on. That's quite
different from making two copies of a document, handing them off to two
people, getting two more copies back, and then having to figure out how
to make a single document from your three different versions.

> Note that -- according to Mark Crispin, who wrote the RFCs -- one of
> the motivations for IMAP was allowing multiple users to share one copy
> of a message and its attachments on the server, although I don't know
> whether real IMAP servers implement that for "private" mail.

Interesting. But did he intend that if someone, e.g., deleted an
attachment it should be deleted for all the other users, too? That
sounds...sub-optimal.

> On the other, in my experience, it's still painful, because I'm always
> tripping over colleagues' poor taste in organization -- if you try to
> fix it, they get [mad] because they can't find "their stuff".

Well, in some ways I could consider that beneficial: it exposes friction
in working methods that should probably be smoothed out. Then again, the
realist in me says that people will bullishly stick with what they've
done before no matter how much it hurts them to do so, so I guess this
has to be taken with a grain of salt.

But keep in mind, Docs etc. doesn't *force* everybody to use one copy;
it simply enables it and makes it the easiest way to work. If you really
want to, you can still easily make multiple copies. (Heck, instead of
giving someone the URL to your document you can download a copy in Word
format and attach it to your Gmail message. And in fact there are good
reasons to do this sometimes.)

> Life is much easier if evyerybody has a real repo and can back your
> changes out without tedious negotiations (until the group needs to
> publish :-/ ). (Well, I'm not sure of that, because the people are
> very different. Maybe the git users are just more competent!)

Well, I'm not thinking so these days. I live and die by Git myself
(and Subversion before that, and CVS before that, and RCS before that,
and yes, even sccs way back when). But I'm totally anal-retentive, so
probably not a good exemplar.

I've spent enough time over the past dozen years battling with other
programmers who are apparently desperate to keep things like Subversion
and Git out of the hands of "business people" that I suspect that for
many developers, version control is more cargo-cult programming than
anything they actually feel is useful.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch