The complaint alleges that Google unsuccessfully tried to engage the Interior Department in discussions surrounding consideration of Google Apps. However, the agency later put at a request for quote (RFQ) that apparently specified only the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (federal) could be considered. Google is now suing, saying that this decision violates the federal “Competition in Contracting Act” (CICA). Here’s a short summary of what CICA provides (from a US government report explaining the Act):

Any procurement contract not entered into through the use of procurement procedures expressly authorized by a particular statute is subject to the Competition in Contracting Act (CICA). CICA requires that contracts be entered into after ‘full and open competition through the use of competitive procedures’ unless certain circumstances exist that would permit agencies to use noncompetitive procedures.

There are a number of circumstances where CICA doesn’t apply or where exceptions exist. The question before the court will be whether the Interior Department’s behavior fell within an exception to the statute, in this case the “limited source justification.”

Regardless of the merits of the claim and potential outcome of the case, which will likely be settled with the government having to consider Google, the willingness to sue here seems to indicate Google’s seriousness  in competing with Microsoft for government (and education) business up and down the line.

It’s hard to get an exact sense of exactly how many users of Google Apps are out there; some have estimated it’s more than 50 million users. (If GMail by itself counts, then undoubtedly.) A Google post in March reported that 25 million people have “gone Google.” A more recent post in September said that the overall Google Apps number is over 30 million people and more than 3 million businesses.

Back in October, Google would OCR web documents that were scans and make those searchable. But there was no easy way for a normal user to scan in their own document and have Google OCR it outside of using the Google API. Now anyone can go to Google Docs, click upload and have Google convert the scans to text for you.

Currently, the supported language for this method of OCR are English, French, Italian, German and Spanish but I am sure Google will continue to add more over time.

The report cites security as the main reason for Google banning Windows. The migration off of Windows reportedly started in January, after the Google was hacked by China. Google has not yet confirmed these reports.

One Google employee told the Financial Times, “getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval.” Another employee said most Google employees have opted towards Mac OS, while others are going with Linux.

Some speculate that this ban on Windows is due to the upcoming launch of Chrome OS, Google’s competing operating system.

Google controls billing for paid apps and gets a 20 percent cut of the revenue. All of the apps will potentially integrate with existing Google tools and services. According to the Google Blog:

Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each . . .

Google’s partner slide at launch:

Google has enjoyed some momentum in the enterprise with Apps but adoption has been tiny relative to Microsoft’s installed base of software users. This however would appear to be a “game changer,” to use the overly used phrase, by bringing all sorts of creativity and new functionality into Google Apps. It also instantly creates a broader ecosystem around the offering that will drive interest and adoption.

As with other apps marketplaces users can search by keyword and refine for functionality (e.g., “payroll”) as well as see user ratings for apps:

Because all this is in the cloud, expect varying degrees of mobile integration.

We were invited but I was unable to attend and so didn’t get to explore specific questions and issues, such as whether this would become more consumer-facing or a parallel consumer version would emerge at some point. However, there is much more discussion of particulars on Techmeme.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google said:

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.

This is a major move by Google for several reasons, here are just a few:

(1) There are many companies forcing users to remain on IE6, those people won’t be able to fully utilize Google Docs and Sites.

(2) Many people who have no idea what a browser is, still uses IE6 – what do you think they will upgrade to when they are forced by Google to upgrade?

(3) Webmasters have been trying to kill IE6 for years, can Google make that a reality?

(4) Google is not saying not to use Internet Explorer, just don’t use IE6.

Living In The Cloud

For those not up on the term, “cloud computing” is a reference to the idea that your programs and data live on the internet rather than on your computer. Need to write a letter? You don’t install Microsoft Word, then compose the letter and save it to your computer’s hard drive. You open your browser, go to Google Docs, create the letter there and save it to be stored with Google.

The internet is the “cloud,” and by letting everything live within it, you’re promised great benefits. That file you need? As long as you can get online, it’s available to you. You can get it from your laptop, a friend’s computer or from your cell phone. It’s even backed up for you. And painful software installations? Forget about it! When’s the last time Gmail said it needed to download a security update to your computer and then prompted you to restart after it was finished?

Cloud Computing, Google & Being A Big Target

Enticing. Seductive. What’s not to love? And Google has built a huge part of its business around the idea that we should trust both the cloud computing concept and Google itself. Just this week, the company announced 1GB of storage for any type of files. The hacking attacks call that all into question more than anything I can think of before.

What do we know so far? Google only tells us that there was a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on its “corporate infrastructure” that resulted in the theft of “intellectual property.” What’s that mean, exactly?

Well, one report now out from IDG is that Google apparently maintains a system to monitor or collect data about users in case it is served with a search warrant — and that the hackers got into that system. An anonymous source is quoted saying:

Right before Christmas, it was, ‘Holy s***, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems]

Hmm. I’ve often joked with people that there’s a secret room deep under the Googleplex that houses two people who do nothing but watch everything that goes on through Google’s servers. Sworn to secrecy, their job is to defend the data, no matter what. And if one of them should go crazy, why the other one is there armed and willing to take action, kind of like those in nuclear weapons silos. You remember the movie War Games, right?

Well, I guess it’s not so much a joke. While on the one hand, I can see why Google would want to create such a system, it’s also blindingly obvious what a potential target it would be for hackers. Moreover, it simply highlights what a target Google itself is.

Most criticism over the years about Google and data that it collects or stores has focused on the idea that Google itself would be the bad actor. Google would go evil and spy on everything you do. In reality, it may be external parties that we should be most worried about.

Google: The New Windows, With All The Viruses?

Consider the “old” computer model. Windows is the most popular operating system out there. Despite Microsoft running it, there have been no major examples I can think of where Microsoft has been found to have collected data through that operating system that has later leaked out. However, Windows is also the operating system that to my knowledge is most prone to virus and malware attacks. Because so many people use it, Windows itself sits on individual computers as a big target begging to be attacked by external parties.

Google is the new operating system for many people. Indeed, the coming Google OS will literally make Google into an operating system, where you’ll access Google services (as well as the rest of the web) through a Google browser. Google is our computer, where we get our email, store our documents, leave our spreadsheets and much more. All that data, just sitting over there. A big huge target, begging to be attacked.

This Was A Cloud Computing Attack

Google has and will continue to assure us that everything is safe. Indeed, on the same day it made the announcement about the hacking attempts, it had a separate blog post specifically assuring us that cloud computing remained secure:

This was not an assault on cloud computing. It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure.

While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust.

I bolded the key part which frankly is wrong. It was very much was an attack on cloud computing, as Google’s main blog post made clear. Hackers went after Gmail accounts, not just through malware-infected computers but directly by targeting Google, that post told us. Gmail — your email, stored in the cloud. That’s an attack on cloud computing.

Remember, before Gmail came, you didn’t leave your email sitting in the cloud for very long. It cost you money to do so. You downloaded it to your own computer and deleted it from the cloud. Gmail ended all that, assuring people they need never delete anything again.

What Exactly Got Taken?

So spare me the suggestion this wasn’t an attack on cloud computing. Reassure me another way, such as telling me in the main post that only “limited” data got out about two Gmail accounts “such as” the subject line of emails in those accounts.

No worries then, because you know that subject lines never have any revealing info in them. Or that in Gmail, subject lines often include a little bit of the opening part of the email itself. And next to the subject line, the sender is listed. Was that information seen?

Remember me putting “such as” in quotes? That’s because Google only specifically described two types of the “limited” data that was seen. What else might have been viewed remains completely open to speculation.

Still, let’s say we completely trust that this time, Google fended off the nasties. What about next time? Because there’s sure to be a next time. Will it be successful then?

The Human Weakness

Also note that Google’s apparently investigating if there were insiders involved — people within Google assisting with this. Even if that’s not true this time, again, what about next time? Google employs thousands of people. Unlike early Googlers, the new folks are not getting incredibly wealthy. Can they be bribed? Might some look around out of curiosity? Goodness, do we now have to worry that government agents from any country (including those from the US) might go undercover to gain access? Hand me my tinfoil hat! Except it’s not sounding so crazy, anymore.

Meanwhile, the specter of human mistakes still linger. Last week, Google emailed an undisclosed number of people information about businesses that they had no connection with. How’d that happen? Human error. Woah — what type of human error? Exactly how did that screw up happen? Sorry, Google’s not talking more in public about that.

We Got The Censorship Angle, Now Back To Data Security

It’s time for the stories to start shifting. Google gets hacked, so it reacts by deciding to no longer censor. As a result, the coverage so far has been largely about how that change will impact Google’s business prospects in China.

The focus really should get back on the issue of Google being hacked. I’m as glad as many people are that Google’s going to stop censoring. I also don’t think Google purposely made the anti-censorship move and announcement to distract from the issues that being hacked raises. But that indeed needs much more attention.

And what to do. Pull all your data down? That’s a personal decision. I love having my email easy to search by being in the cloud. But I’m not sure I want to start uploading my financial documents. I’m less certain that I want to have company documents sitting out there. I’m kind of thinking in the era of cheap hard drives, I might just do more carrying around my own little cloud with me. Encrypted, of course!

Ironically, such a shift could also make data less safe. Will we get back to the days when people routinely emailed files back and forth through unsecured email connections? There’s also a need for perspective. You’re probably far more at risk of having your data exposed by using a weak password than through government-backed hacking attempts.

Still, the cloud lost some trust this week. I think more trust will be lost as further details emerge — and that’s not just for Google but for any company offering cloud computing. How that trust will be rebuilt, for Google, depends on how forthcoming the company is about what happened, what got out and why we should really feel secure against future attempts.

Over the years, there have been many rumors of the GDrive. We actually covered these rumors several times in 2007, but nothing really came about on this topic back then.

For more details on how to use this new feature, see the help section at the Google Docs site.

Something’s up with Google’s Chrome operating system. Don’t know what, but we’ll all know soon as a press conference begins at 10AM Pacific. I’m coming at your live from the Googleplex. Buckle up, and we’ll see what’s happening. You can also watch from home. Webcast info is here.

There will also be related coverage developing at Techmeme, including news the Chrome OS source code is now apparently live. as Google’s Matt Cutts has tweeted.

And we start. Sundar Pichai says not launching today. A year away from that but have made constant progress and will show demo of what they’ve got so far and how will go to market. But primary reason is as of today the code will be fully open. Developers internally will work on the same tree as those internally.

Where at after a year since the Chrome browser? 40 million users, 39X faster JavaScript than Internet Explorer. Most users who use Chrome send most common feedback that Chrome is fast. 19 stable releases. Lots of work on HTML 5 to push web forwad.

Chrome for Mac is close to launch. “Looking at the number of Macs in the room, I’m excited about it.” Linux will come. Nearing the point of releasing Chrome Extensions.

Talk about wanting ways to do better graphics, video/audio playback, multiprocessor use.

Three industry trends.

Huge “phenomenal” growth in netbooks. Users view them and response as ultrathin ultralight PC.

Hundreds of millions of uses live in the cloud.

Phones are effectively becoming like computers, while laptops are more like phones (in terms of always on connectivity and long power, lighter to carry.

Looking at all these trends, the question we ask ourselves, is there a better model of computing we can give our users. We think so, and that’s what Google Chrome OS is.

Focused on speed, security and simplicity. No applications. All in the browser. Easy to use. We want it to be possible for people to share machines and feel comfortable with that.

Since no applications installed on the system, they can monitor stuff — completely inside the browser security model.

And now we’re about to see a live demo. Here’s a video I shot of this portion (live blogging continues below it):

Applications run in tabs, like in a browser. you can pin a tab to make it an “application tab” so you can easily go back to it. There’s also an app menu.

There are also panels. Light weight windows you can have all the time. Showing a chat window for Google Talk, for example. There’s a notepad panel. Where’s that data go. It sync to the cloud, shows up in Google Docs (so is the cloud in Chrome OS = Google’s own cloud?).

Doing search for Beautiful Day on Google, using OneBox to start playing music in a persistent window.’

Now we’re playing chess. Chrome OS version of Solitare?

Now showing Google Books and how you can go in full screen mode and use this as an ereader.

It’s common for people to have multiple windows, but so far, we’ve been in one window. But you can easily move to different Chrome “instances.” IE, multiple desktops. If you have a Mac, you know of this as Spaces (which are awesome by the way.”

Shows how you can browse files. Pulls an Excel app up. Clicks on it and shows how it launches the Microsoft Excel app, stressing this means the OS isn’t locked to Google or a particular cloud.

Now taking picture with an Android phone. Now showing how you can bring it up in Chrome. Hey that’s me. Ugh! Took a picture of us in the front :)

Now Matt (and I didn’t get his last name, sorry — but it’s not Cutts) is talking Chrome under the hood. They want to be like a TV, instant on, book out of RAM and fast rather than from a hard drive. Not to load things that aren’t needed, like a bios or OS call to find non-existent floppy drives.

Security. Chrome checks on each boot, a “verified” boot, “we double check that you’re running what you should be running.” They check for the cryptographic signatures. See, big word. it’s safe. Let’s call it a digital signature.

Now let’s say the signature check fails for some reason, such as with malware or some other reason. They find it happens, do the detection, system repairs itself. System does fresh download, and restarts. It essentially reimages your computer. But without the pain. Made in a way where all your system data is saved. “You don’t lose anything in the process.”

How make sure applications don’t harm your machine? Applications on operating systems now have full control. In Chrome OS, apps are all web apps, which have different security model, where the browser takes pains to assume they’re hostile. They can’t do things to your hard drive or system. So in Chrome, the system uses “security sandboxing” and basically doesn’t trust the applications.

Every tab in Chrome OS separated from others. File system is locked down. Lots of technical stuff. But user data is constantly synced with the cloud. This has this wonderful property that if you … lose your device, you get a new one, log in, and it’s just the way you left it.

And now back to Sundar on how to go to market. Says will talk much more next year. Working on the Google Chrome OS image, the software. Don’t support hard drives. Only solid state. Only some wireless adapters (I think he said). So you want to run this on any old computer? Might not work. “You would have to go buy a Chrome OS device in the marketing … our timeframe is next year .. want to make holiday season.”

And now we get a movie explaining to us in basic terms on how Chrome OS is better. Like how if it doesn’t take 45 seconds to boot, you could make a sandwich.

It all sounds so perfect. Kind of like those Mac ads. Be cool if it “just worked” in the way the Mac is supposed to but doesn’t always.

What about when you’re on a plan and offline? You can cache material locally and play, videos, etc.

Can you run it in a virtual machine today? They do for developers. A virtual machine is a great way to do that.

Android apps won’t run on Chrome Apps.

Mike Arrington  from TechCrunch asks, really, no way to run third party apps? The current plan is to support web apps, so they feel they are supporting third party apps. Arrington says that’s what Steve Jobs said about the iPhone. Sundar says it is different on larger form factors (in other words, I think, since you’re not running a cutdown browser, what happens on a “real” computer will work on a Chrome OS machine.

Business model on Chrome? Full free, fully open source. As more people use the web, it benefits Google as a company.

Question. What was demoed, can’t I do that with any browser logged into various cloud services? As a model of computing, Google thinks things are much different.

What if cloud is down? How can Google be trusted with the data?

If cloud is down, that affects people on computers now. You can’t get to email, for example. As for trust, really important that users have choice. Users are always in control. You can decide what to do.

And now Sergey Brin has come in and been invited up to the Q&A.

Plans to be like an second OS that could be booted? Not a focus.

Question again on devices. How’s it going to handle things like printers? Sundar: plan to support all standard keywords, mice, anything that identifies itself as a standard storage. Looking at printers. Yes, Chrome OS will print.

Question to Sergey on competition and how things have changed with Google making its own laptops. He responds:

Call us dumb businessmen, but we focus on user needs … rather than competitors .. so this is meant to fill a need.

And the session concludes. Also see the Google blog post here.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Danny gets to have all the fun and live blog the event, while I get to watch all the videos posted to the various Google blogs. There is a dummy video on the Google Blog and more technical videos on the Chrome blog. Here they are all those videos:

Now, it appears Google is showing a link that reads just “View” and links you to the PDF within a Google Docs view. Please note that this happens on some PDFs and not all. Here is a picture of that:

When you click on “View” it takes you to Google Docs. For example, for the search [triangle heights concurrency] you can see the View link and when you click on it, you are taken here, to Google Docs.

Hat tip to Google Operating System for spotting this.

There’s no product or specific consumer offering here. Rather Google is trying to advocate multiple initiatives in parallel that the company believes are important to usher in a better, faster internet (including for mobile devices). This Google Code Blog post lays out the arguments and suggestions as does the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google very much needs third party participation and cooperation and so has established this site to teach best practices and offer tools to speed up websites. In addition, Google says it will seek to advocate broadband friendly practices in Washington D.C. and abroad.

One can pretty easily understand Google’s motives. A faster internet means more usage and a better online infrastructure means that the web and the browser become better development platforms.

Theoretically no technology company should object; all would presumably benefit from a faster and more user-friendly internet. The fourth bullet of the Google post, about the so-called White Spaces initiative, is where some controversy might creep in to the broader effort:

While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC’s decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry

Not everyone, chiefly incumbent ISPs and maybe wireless carriers, would be so happy with cheaper, more accessible broadband. Depending on ultimate retail cost it could be somewhat disruptive to current ISP and WiFi business models. But all that remains to be seen.

Google is clearly pursuing self-interest here but in this case self interest would appear to be broadly aligned with the interests of other web companies and the public more generally.