Victor,
This is a dangerous topic for me to be touching... Is that an eggshell I see
over there? *steps carefully by it* Needless to say, eggshells abound or
not, this horse is not dead.
A few members of ACNS met with Google just the other day, I don't think that
is too big of a secret. Google called upon many universities and colleges
around Michigan to join them at their compound in Ann Arbor. Google does
have some great features, even as a systems administrator for mail.msu.edu I
regularly use GMail and I have been using their services for over two years
now. Of course the price tag is very attractive like you said.
There are many, many factors to take into consideration that everyone seems
to not think about when they hear how great the service is and how much
everything is going to cost in the end ($0.00 in the short run).
I don't have all the details of what Google is putting on the plate as I was
not at the meeting, but I did get a general run down from my boss who may
choose to follow-up on all this later (if he is already busy typing a
response as I'm typing this one). Its an exciting prospect, I have to
admit. When he came back from the meeting and told me what he told me, I
thought "That's it, we're going to Google."
There is a principled approach to take when thinking about all this. Its
not just dollars and cents. Its dollars and _sense_ as they say! There
is/has been major concern over who owns the data. Do we potentially
outsource only students? Or do we potentially outsource faculty & staff
too? Google assures us that the user owns their own data. We still
maintain a very small semblance of control. So you potentially could
outsource everyone/everything.
Lets go back to those principles I was starting to dig into (lots of
sentence fragments coming up here)... Suppose we do it. Outsource email.
For everyone. It costs us nothing. Users own their data. The university
saves whatever amount of $$$ by no longer funding the mail.msu.edu project
and everything is going along smoothly. (remember I don't have all the
details, nor is there even a initial contract to look at) Google makes a
change to their policy that we don't agree with. What do we do? 1) We're
under contract for another X amount of years, therefore 1a) We take it to
court to get out of the contract. 1b) We wait it out and cross our arms and
pout the whole time until the contract expires.
Say that either one of those two options happen. Then what?? We just axed
the funding for the primary email group. Lets say a significant amount of
time has passed and the people we had maintaining our email servers in the
past no longer are up on the new technologies. We somehow have to find
money and training to get back on our feet! We somehow have to find a way
to migrate all of our data back! Would Google even let us do that
(presuming for a second that the policy change was that now Google owns the
data and not the user)??
We actually had a lengthy discussion about this at lunch today with some
other coworkers. One fella pointed out that Dell is having to deal with
this exact issue right now with bringing their Support Desk back from India.
You have to somehow maintain a concurrent level of existing service while
somehow migrating things back to your control. It would be an incredible
mess, and something that most people don't think about when they hear $FREE.
Back to more principles. What we are getting with our free service is not
the right for Google to provide ads. They aren't making money on ads (well
they are, but...) what they are making money on is compiling demographic
information. And selling that information outright. At least this is the
potential. Again, remember I'm lacking exact specifics.
What about new students? What about people who don't like GMail or Google?
They'd have no choice but to accept it. Will Google allow them to forward
their email to Yahoo!? Who knows. What if someone is choosing between our
school and another school, and they find out that we only provide GMail as
an option for email, and that eats them up so much inside they choose to go
to another school?
To sum up this long email, the possibility exists that email will be
outsourced. It might not be to Google. It could be to anyone! Even UMich!
(HA! Think about that one, especially if UMich outsourced email ;) This
horse is very much alive, and I think we are going to spend a good chunk of
this summer trying to figure it out.
As someone who works for the mail team, I encourage more discussion on this
topic! Because as it stands what I do for a living is on the line (I'd
still have a job elsewhere around the dept. (I'm told) so no worries there).
We definitely need more insight into what our customers think, and since the
majority of you on this list are our technical customers who have an insider
view of policy and principles around here, I'm sure we will find this to be
quite an engaging topic.
Cheers.
./brm
|
