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U.S. Army Chooses Google Workspace

295 points by kaycebasques 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago
amnamrizvi1 4y ago
I might be out of date, but what happened to Google's pledge of never working for a military?
- smegsicle 4y ago
  iirc there have been protests by google's employees against working with military, but the company as a whole seemed to be trying their best to ignore it was there ever a company pledge?
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    There were company pledges to, more or less, not provide custom ai solutions to target weapons, but that's a very limited commitment.
- dekhn 4y ago
  It was never a pledge to not work with or for a military. The people who fought that are gone. Kurian has authority to cut deals and doesn't worry about memegen.
  - KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
    I have never seen another company that offers its own employees a platform to mock its leadership.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      There are distinct limitations- there is a team that "polices" memegen and will send you (and your manager, and HR) threatening emails (including suggesting job termination) if you post something that's not very nice. Back in the day somebody made a meme which had a D&D alignment chart for all the Google leaders- Vic Gundotra was Chaotic Evil, while Urs was Lawful Good. Had to take it down because an SVP complained.
      - EricE 4y ago
        And who wouldn't expect otherwise? Their lucky it just got taken down and they didn't get fired. It boggles my mind that people think complaining about work - ON WORK TIME AND WORK RESOURCES - is some sort of protected activity. Freaking stupid.
        saagarjha 4y ago
        Having an idea of how employees feel, as well as an outlet for their frustration, can be productive.
chatterhead 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  If you are so inclined, I recommend you reach out to the United States Senate Committee on the Armed Forces [1]. I also would recommend, if you have the time, a well crafted freedom of information act request regarding this procurement [2]. If you find no malfeasance, you’ve still done your job as a citizen keeping government accountable. [1] https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/about/members https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/about/members [2] https://www.muckrock.com/ https://www.muckrock.com/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
easton 4y ago
Doesn’t the rest of the DoD uses Office? Is this not going to cause a bunch of interagency drama from having to convert documents from Docs to Office? (or is there some big button you can press in the GSuite admin console to say “make everyone save everything in Office format, yes, I know some features will work weird.”)
- rootsudo 4y ago
  Exactly this, it makes no sense at all.
  - dismalpedigree 4y ago
    Integration between systems is not important. They SAY it’s important, but the current state of 8 different solutions for every need that are deployed say otherwise.
- mnholt 4y ago
  > “The government has asked for more choice in cloud vendors…” This was probably a major factor. Government, and more specifically DoD need more variety.
- melenaboija 4y ago
  I used to work for a big international company (+100k employees) that heavily used and depended on MS Office and migrated to Google Workspace. There was a lot of hesitance on the migration and also keeping the users engaged using it (I think that most of the people can not even imagine that there is something else besides Word and Excel) and it was one of the most successful decision I had seen for the users. There is this irrational fear to stop using MS Office and to me the fear is now having to use it. I am not working with that company anymore and having to deal with Office again has been painful.
  - pottertheotter 4y ago
    I just took a new job at a company that uses Workspace and it drives me nuts for two reasons. The biggest is that Sheets is awful compared to Excel. The second is having work in a browser tab. It’s so much easier to keep things organized when switching around between programs when you have an actual app.
rootsudo 4y ago
It is a weird choice, especially considering how every computer assigned to an end user is a Windows Desktop, Especially Widnows 10 as of 2017 - https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2016/05/10/ https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2016/05/10/ I can see how licensing for Office is "expensive" but this is the DoD so that should be the least concerning issue. Training is touched in the PR, but, it is not 1:1, especially for excel spreadsheets with macros, pivot tables or integration to PowerBi, which again is Office 365. I doubt FPA/Accounting and such are going to move over to Google. For tech, same ,I don't see it happening. I could see an excuse as "more secure" as the identity is entirely cloud based, and you don't need to label/track content via Azure AIP/DRM'ish and it's easily accessibly within google, but that is entirely possible on O365 after it's tuned for that. I also am curious about general mail routing and such, no more exchange? No more outlook? (Well, I guess you could use outlook via imap, but then again what's the point?) This PR just has me asking more questions, especially since all of the options AFAIK for gsuite require an active internet connection and a modern/newer browser. The same org that uses Panasonic Toughbooks, is going to have a have to use an "offline" mode of gsuite.
- mnholt 4y ago
  This is almost certainly a proof of concept based on language in the PR. The Government should always keep a pulse on the market and be willing to buck the status quo. Office is the standard now, but GSuite could be so in 15 years.
  - sirjaz 4y ago
    God I hope not. GSuite is a resource hog, well almost any webapp is. Also, it makes it more insecure. It is always better to have native apps that work off-line than a webapp
    - judge2020 4y ago
      How is it more insecure?
      - 4y ago
rhacker 4y ago
I know I shouldn't type this but isn't it weird that Google remains the last tech giant that hasn't had a major breach. I mean small breaches based on CSRF issues and what not, but nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by. Probably part of the reason the Army chose Google. I think I would normally disagree with a govt. agency using a cloud platform, but it might actually be MORE secure than what they can do themselves.
- walrus01 4y ago
  Depends if you consider the NSA breaching their inter-data-center traffic 15+ years ago or not.
  - ericmay 4y ago
    No reason to really consider that as relevant here since if you consider it then you also have to consider that they’ve breached not only every potential contractor for the USG but also any company that matters.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - feanaro 4y ago
      > but also any company that matters. Wow, that's pretty loaded. Is this some kind of no true Scotsman situation?
      - dekhn 4y ago
        Huh? No.
      - ericmay 4y ago
        I mean every big tech company of course: Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, etc. but also they're going to have backdoors into companies like Boeing or perhaps 3M, banks, etc. "Matters" in this context was related to national security concerns.
mtgx 4y ago
faizshah 4y ago
I feel like people are missing some context here, this isn’t about Google Workspace vs Office 365. After the JEDI contract controversy, the DoD switched strategies to procure from multiple cloud vendors: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/release/article/2682992/future-of-the-joint-enterprise-defense-infrastructure-cloud-contract/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/release/article/268299...
- jeffcore 4y ago
  More specifically, this looks like an answer to the Army's Office 365 licensing woes, which initially did not include licenses for these 250,000 junior soldiers to cut costs: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/07/14/gmail-fix-for-junior-soldiers-army-launches-google-email-beta/ https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/07/14/gmail-fi...
  - dismalpedigree 4y ago
    Right. So now they will have two systems that can’t work well together. Brilliant!
    - solardev 4y ago
      That's OK, next year's budget will include funding for a third service to bridge them together for three times the cost.
      - crakenzak 4y ago
        Hey, as long as its the taxpayers money they're wasting who cares, right!
    - kube-system 4y ago
      You’re assuming they need to work together. The Army is huge.
    - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
      Yeah, but also, I'll bet you in a couple of years the next offer from Microsoft will come with a steep discount on Office licenses.
amnamrizvi1 4y ago
why is my comment not showing when i log out or use another browser? :(
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smegsicle 4y ago
  your comments were shadowed "[dead]" probably because you are posting from a new account you can enable viewing others' dead comments with 'showdead' in your account settings
  - amnamrizvi1 4y ago
bcardarella 4y ago
Does anyone actually think this is endorsement? At this point Google is the 2022 version of 1998 Microsoft. Big, slow, and dumb. We all know we're getting fucked by them yet not hard enough to quit yet. Soon.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  Could we even quit? I tried to use Proton Mail and all my emails on a brand new account, even to my own gmail, went to spam. :(
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Hmm, I'm using Proton Mail with a personal domain and it's working fine.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    Like Printing, Email is becoming less and less important. In my personal life I almost never use email for communication, it is prominent in business for now but even that is shifting
  - djkoolaide 4y ago
    I know it's "shilled" here all the time, but I've had zero issues with Fastmail.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Fastmail works well
  - mysterypie 4y ago
    In same vein some e-commerce sites and payment processors secretly distrust commercial email services and don't tell you that they've blacklisted your email provider. You go to make a car or flight reservation, enter all kinds of info including your credit card, and then bam, it says "Oops, something went wrong, try again later". Or an e-commerce site asks you to enter your email and they'll send you a confirmation code, but the confirmation email never comes. I've determined by experiment--using a different IP but a Gmail email address--that a frequent cause is a secret bias against commercial email services. It's particularly infuriating because I think a commercial email user with a paid account is a much lower fraud risk than a free Gmail user.
tonfreed 4y ago
Starting a sweep for when Google shuts down the Army's account and they can't find anyone to help them.
- LASR 4y ago
  They can always tweet for support and hope it goes viral for someone to notice.
devoutsalsa 4y ago
I hope Google doesn’t disable the account of an essential person in a time of crisis.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  Eagerly awaiting military leadership posting about this on HN: 'Ask HN: Locked out of account, overseas Google support keeps leading us in circles' That or soldiers getting reprimanded because accidental auto-responder was like 'Haha!' or 'Great!' to something requiring a deeper response.
  - bentcorner 4y ago
    > accidental auto-responder This stuff can be dangerous. My son asked me a question in chat and my phone somehow auto-responded a "No" answer. I'm guessing I put my phone in my pocket without locking it. Luckily I caught it in time and as soon as that happened I disabled all auto-responding features.
    - notimetorelax 4y ago
      Same story for Apple Watch. A wrong answer is one misclick away. All auto response should only type the response and wait the usual send command.
- wil421 4y ago
  If they run their algos on anything grunts are uploading it’s going to cause some headache. My ex-Marine friends claimed there was crazy stuff on the military share drives that were accessible by anyone on the network.
poof131 4y ago
So glad to see this. Military IT has been atrocious. I viewed the Navy Marine Corp Internet (NMCI) as damn near treasonous levels of awful when I got out a decade ago and assumed little improvement with the way contracts are done and the entrenched vendors. Happy to see Google win this not just because I prefer the solution now to MS, but that some change is happening. I still can’t believe we spent $7T on the global war on terror and no one is asking questions.
- sure_about_that 4y ago
  == I still can’t believe we spent $7T on the global war on terror and no one is asking questions.== Everyone who asked before we started that “war” was called a traitor.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
  - jti107 4y ago
    dont forget the tax cuts and bailouts for big business that is added to the US national debt. currently at 31 trillion...but investing in education and healthcare for normal people is socialism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - exq 4y ago
      Student load forgiveness is socialism, but hundreds of billions in PPP loans with no obligation to repay is "stimulating the economy" Classy.
      - _-david-_ 4y ago
        The government shut down businesses so it makes sense to compensate them. The government didn't force people to go the college or take out loans to pay for it.
        4y ago
helf 4y ago
Yeah, no thanks. I work in a company that has forced Workspaces upon us and it randomly is a nightmare. Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there. It is a complete nightmare adjusting access to random files. You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it. Ugh. Everything being browser based with crap desktop clients is the worst. They also want to constantly share crap via Google Drive and, unless I have missed something major, you can't run Google Drive, in Windows at least, under multiple signed in users with the same drive letter. You'll just get access denied errors. THAT makes shortcuts and all a complete fucking nightmare. I have to often shrug when my users have issues and send in a report to the Japanese head office and hope they respond timely. I know /that/ isn't a workspaces fault, but it just compounds things.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Google Sheets is wonderful in countless ways. It’s so handy to have multiplayer spreadsheets. But anyone who thinks it’s a drop-in replacement for Excel is a fool.
  - helf 4y ago
    Right? I mean, like I said, a lot of the complaints I have aren't really the fault of Workspaces. We actually use the multiuser functionality of Sheets a lot but I still run into constant issues. And the fact a huge chunk of this crap does /not/ play nice with /multi-user local workstations/, in 2022, drives me bonkers.
  - yodon 4y ago
    Office 365 provides multiplayer spreadsheets, in addition to a great desktop client, and the ability to work in-browser if you prefer.
    - Waterluvian 4y ago
      Cool I should give that a try. But a decade ago that didn’t exist and for undergrad and grad school Sheets was amazing. I almost did my dissertation in Docs but decided to use Pages instead (which was simpler than Word but a few times lacked what I needed… if I could do it again I’d of used Word)
khana 4y ago
plaidfuji 4y ago
“Hey who’s xjinping@ccp.cn? Do they really need Editor access to the East Asia Strategy shared drive? Ah crap I accidentally clicked accept”
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  Luckily Google's blocked in China /s
- idealmedtech 4y ago
  Can you imagine if there was one authoritative shared folder where the comprehensive strategy docs lived? Ah, an efficient government, what a dream!
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    Security through bureaucracy :)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  I mean the whole point of workspace is that the admin can set policies that disallow this (or at least require admin approval). https://support.google.com/a/answer/60781?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/60781?hl=en
- anshumankmr 4y ago
  Though you may joke, I 100% feel its likely someone from the CCP is going to try hacking someone’s account through social engineering. Which makes me wonder will the US Army store top secret files on their workspace.
  - potatoman22 4y ago
    The press release says its only for controlled unclassified information, so ideally they wouldn't store top secret docs
mupuff1234 4y ago
Seems like a good start to break the dependency on windows.
andrewguenther 4y ago
So the Army uses it but if you're a government contractor you can't use it because you can't get a NIST 800-53 or CMMC compliant configuration on Workspace... Before anyone tells me that Workspace is FedRAMP compliant: Yes, I know, but they do not expose the controls necessary for non-government users to be compliant.
- milesward 4y ago
  We've been delivering on that by adding Virtru, if you want help with it, miles@sada.com
- nine_k 4y ago
  For those of us who are not well versed in these standards, could you describe, or just bane, some crucial parts that would be needed for compliance but are missing?
alberth 4y ago
The Army also has some embarrassing past use of Google Workspace. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/david-petraeus-was-brought-down-by-gmail/265057/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/david...
- judge2020 4y ago
  That's gmail. Hardly similar to the IT control powerhouse that is Google Workspace (but as a SAML service provider, ie. their user auth is still handled on the backend by internal systems. They aren't moving user auth to Google).
redler 4y ago
On the positive side of the ledger, this slightly decreases the likelihood of Google shutting it down.
- EricE 4y ago
  Ha! As if...
- elnr 4y ago
  It, however, does not impact the chance of Google renaming it again. I look forward for the day when we come full circle and they re-name it Google Apps for Business, Government, Education, and Grandma Bertha.
arthurcolle 4y ago
Has anyone had issues with normal INDEX/MATCH stuff in Google Sheets? I was actually OK with moving from Excel to Google Sheets since the coverage of functions seemed mostly ok, minus all the new cool shit they added in one of the more recent releases (XLOOKUP, etc) but I literally tried a trivial INDEX/MATCH with a simple 5x20 matrix of price values and literally could not get it to work even though the identical "code" worked in Excel. Really, really frustrating. I was working at a hedge fund at the time and I was simultaneously working on a real time portfolio dashboard as a web app, and needed to also have a stopgap solution in the form of a spreadsheet for people to play with and debugging differences in Google's spreadsheet function implementations and Excel's was infuriating
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  IME in a similar industry, Google Sheets is to (desktop) Excel what a $30 Casio USB "MIDI" keyboard is to a Craigslist Steinway
- qntmfred 4y ago
  nope. i tend to use QUERY() in sheets these days anyways. more versatile
  - arthurcolle 4y ago
    I'll check this out, thanks.
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  No one really uses spreadsheets any more except as nicer CSV outputs.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Sure they don't. Not everything is ML and datascience. You'd be surprised what untrained people who like to experiment can cobble together in offices.
filoeleven 4y ago
No one has mentioned the Pinkertons yet, so I guess I should. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
- randlet 4y ago
  I'm aware of some of the history of the Pinkerton's but what is the connection to this story?
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  what in the world does that have to do with a google contract with the army?
exabrial 4y ago
I’m sure the army would love to be in the middle of a fight and get prompted with a bunch of popups to install chrome and other dumb crap they pull
- SadTrombone 4y ago
  What Google products do you foresee being used in the middle of a firefight?
  - dismalpedigree 4y ago
    US Military fights wars using powerpoint. Seriously. Every brief. Every situation deserves a presentation. So now it will be PowerPoint AND googles version
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      That’s used by command post and headquarters staff - not people doing the fighting.
      - dismalpedigree 4y ago
        Command post includes a lieutenant making a mission brief or conducting training for a group of 20 privates. Privates are not often authoring power points, but they are definitely consuming them. Sharing isn’t going to work. Its going to be all email all the time.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Does this mean google won't kill off the service?
- judge2020 4y ago
  They were never going to kill anything related to Google Workspace, but certain non-essential products do get sunsetted and deprecated eventually, eg. https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/02/currents-spaces-migration.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/02/currents-spa...
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Might greatly increase it's chances as the US government can say "nuh-uh-uh" on things concerning national security. While google is big, they aren't that big to shutdown the US army's internet.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
Great news everyone: Google might not cancel Google Workspace without at least a year's notice now.
- jvolkman 4y ago
  Google itself is totally reliant on Workspace so it's not going anywhere.
johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
Can we start a petition against Google? Surely we can get enoygh support from engineers and developers to get the message across that using Google services is a bad idea.
- judge2020 4y ago
  > using Google services is a bad idea Could you elaborate?
imwillofficial 4y ago
Hope it sticks around
ericd 4y ago
I'm always impressed at how difficult the Workspace Admin Console makes doing literally anything. It's like I'm thrown into a database with an aggressively denormalized schema and expected to figure out how to piece together complete records by hand via queries.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Except that you can't query across anything, because that would be useful. One of my "acid tests" for a well-designed UI is if integrates metrics with configuration. For example, VMware will show cute little inline bar charts of CPU and Memory utilisation when browsing virtual machines. Similarly, some firewall or load-balancer products will show "hit counters" or similar stats next to rules or virtual servers. For the other 99% of products out there, it's up to the end user to manually perform the "join" by clicking around the GUI. There may be an API, or a scripting tool, but without fail these won't provide a robust link (a foreign key) that would actually make this easy.
- profwalkstr 4y ago
  It still many orders of magnitude better than Office 365 admin interface though. What a sad state of affairs.
lostgame 4y ago
Always boggles the mind how companies are proud of be part of an industry of systematic murder. Fun.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Systematic murder is an extremely profitable industry to be in, and companies are first and foremost proud to be making oodles of money. In a battle between Googlers who have the mistaken impression Google is run by good people and the Googlers who make the company tons of money by signing big government contracts, the latter will win every single time.
mercy_dude 4y ago
It’s not surprising at all. Current administration has setup a revolving door with quite a few Google execs working in the administration. Eric Schmidt is known to have done fundraising in 2020.
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  That reminds me I'm an idiot for defending Google in this.
Schnitz 4y ago
F
phantom_of_cato 4y ago
The military-industrial complex [1] on full display. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex
master_crab 4y ago
So Google offered the Army 250k workspaces for pennies on the dollar. Good for them. And good for the Army. Maybe now MSFT won’t charge DoD as much for 365 again. Sounds like a typical day in the cloud wars. Let’s see what happens when renegotiations come up for the contract.
pmorici 4y ago
I don’t understand why the new mail.mil doesn’t have an option for email only without the Office 365 apps. Seems like that would solve the cost issue.
throwaway892238 4y ago
Late last year Google got FedRAMP High certification for Workspaces and Public Cloud. What this means is that, rather than have to use a "Government" version of Office365, and a "Government" version of AWS, and potentially even other versions for contractors, you can instead just use regular Google services for everything, at the highest levels. Managing different vendors and products and clearance is a nightmare. This is a potential game changer.
- redanddead 4y ago
  Google: Nationalized-lite?
- andrewguenther 4y ago
  No no no no no. This is not true. Google Workspace is FedRAMP compliant for government customers. It is NOT possible to configure Google Workspace in a FedRAMP compliant way as a regular customer. You can't even get NIST 800-171 on Google Workspace without additional tools.
  - throwaway892238 4y ago
    It looks like two provisions it doesn't natively support, but you can slap on a 3rd party tool and you're in business. This is still much better than using two completely different vendors for your collaboration and cloud tools.
    - andrewguenther 4y ago
      For NIST, yes. For FedRAMP, no.
  - topkai22 4y ago
    Yeah, and the whole certification process is way more complex than that. To use the example I’m familiar with, Azure as a whole is FedRAMP High for all US regions. However, if you need to you need to handle DoD IL5 data or justice data, you need to go to Azure Government because they have even stricter personnel screening requirements than FedRAMP. Except the DoD didn’t like sharing a region even with other US Government customers, so there are also a exclusive DoD regions as well. That’s not because Microsoft is trying to market segment. Turns out different parts of the government love making things hard on their suppliers by insisting they are special. I seriously doubt google actually manages to negotiate the minefield that is contracting and CISOs with conflicting requirements like the GP is dreaming of, but cool if they can.
unknownaccount 4y ago
That’s too bad. They should of chosen Nextcloud.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
This is a really really bad idea. The military should never be beholden to a corporation like this for basic day to day operations. It will bite them in the future and probably at the worst possible time.
- galacticaactual 4y ago
  Yeah you should tell all the Windows and Office users in the DOD that.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Still better than them trying to use some insecure alternative that is way less productive.
low_tech_punk 4y ago
Also in the news: (2021) German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice. Ref: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-state-planning-to-switch-25000-pcs-to-libreoffice/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...
kornhole 4y ago
Meanwhile across the Atlantic in Europe, Google and Microsoft are being removed from classrooms, governments, and military agencies in favor of open source private clouds such as Nextcloud with Collabora office. This is due to GDPR and data sovereignty. Private clouds is what these companies fear as features mature.
- MiguelX413 4y ago
  Based Europe
- ifqwz 4y ago
  Europeans being forced to use inferior products is not the win that you think it is.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    Superior data sovereignty and control of the environments is the driver. Some user features are inferior but are being improved with the participation of the user community that includes the IT staffs of the customer organizations who can create add on apps and pull requests to the main code base.
rishabhd 4y ago
Probably they never evaluated support as part of the equation.
karmasimida 4y ago
I mean at last? No self-inflicted red tapes, now Google is a normal company
voisin 4y ago
Boy they’ll be disappointed with Google randomly decides to cancel the product with no explanation. But hey, here’s eight new chat apps.
greesil 4y ago
This is hosted on Google servers?
Gasp0de 4y ago
What happened to "Don't be evil"?
herewulf 4y ago
Where can I DX Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams for this?!
antony565 4y ago
forgotpwd16 4y ago
It's gonna be funny if Google's algorithm ever decides to ban them.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Dear serving US Army personnel, We’re writing to let you know that the Google Workspace Active Conflict Service will be discontinued from noon today at which point your access to your maps, targeting systems, intelligence feeds, supply logistics and battle command will no longer be available. As of that date, issued equipment will be unable to connect to the Google Active Conflict Service and existing connections will be shut down. After cursory deliberation it has been decided that customers would be better served by partners (in Russia and China) which specialise in this segment. What do I need to do? We recommend that you take action urgently to migrate your arse out of any theatre of conflict post-haste. Good luck and thank you for supporting Google products.
stared 4y ago
- Did you share it with vlad@putin.gov.ru?! - Sorry, a misclick. - OK, NP.
workingon 4y ago
Great. We just finally got teams where it isn't complete dogshit and now this! It's awesome that we funnel tons of money to tech companies instead of raising federal government scientist salaries to be competitive enough to just retain the expertise for ourselves!
Kalanos 4y ago
Google proceeds to cancel Workspace next year
indymike 4y ago
Every time my brother in law who is an NCO in the Army comes to visit, it takes about 30 minutes for his laptop to boot up to the point he can log in to do anything. I'm amazed that this is acceptable.

295 points by kaycebasques 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

amnamrizvi1 4y ago

I might be out of date, but what happened to Google's pledge of never working for a military?

smegsicle 4y ago
iirc there have been protests by google's employees against working with military, but the company as a whole seemed to be trying their best to ignore it was there ever a company pledge?
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  There were company pledges to, more or less, not provide custom ai solutions to target weapons, but that's a very limited commitment.
dekhn 4y ago
It was never a pledge to not work with or for a military. The people who fought that are gone. Kurian has authority to cut deals and doesn't worry about memegen.
- KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
  I have never seen another company that offers its own employees a platform to mock its leadership.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    There are distinct limitations- there is a team that "polices" memegen and will send you (and your manager, and HR) threatening emails (including suggesting job termination) if you post something that's not very nice. Back in the day somebody made a meme which had a D&D alignment chart for all the Google leaders- Vic Gundotra was Chaotic Evil, while Urs was Lawful Good. Had to take it down because an SVP complained.
    - EricE 4y ago
      And who wouldn't expect otherwise? Their lucky it just got taken down and they didn't get fired. It boggles my mind that people think complaining about work - ON WORK TIME AND WORK RESOURCES - is some sort of protected activity. Freaking stupid.
      - saagarjha 4y ago
        Having an idea of how employees feel, as well as an outlet for their frustration, can be productive.

chatterhead 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
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toomuchtodo 4y ago
If you are so inclined, I recommend you reach out to the United States Senate Committee on the Armed Forces [1]. I also would recommend, if you have the time, a well crafted freedom of information act request regarding this procurement [2]. If you find no malfeasance, you’ve still done your job as a citizen keeping government accountable. [1] https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/about/members https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/about/members [2] https://www.muckrock.com/ https://www.muckrock.com/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

easton 4y ago

Doesn’t the rest of the DoD uses Office? Is this not going to cause a bunch of interagency drama from having to convert documents from Docs to Office? (or is there some big button you can press in the GSuite admin console to say “make everyone save everything in Office format, yes, I know some features will work weird.”)

rootsudo 4y ago
Exactly this, it makes no sense at all.
- dismalpedigree 4y ago
  Integration between systems is not important. They SAY it’s important, but the current state of 8 different solutions for every need that are deployed say otherwise.
mnholt 4y ago
> “The government has asked for more choice in cloud vendors…” This was probably a major factor. Government, and more specifically DoD need more variety.
melenaboija 4y ago
I used to work for a big international company (+100k employees) that heavily used and depended on MS Office and migrated to Google Workspace. There was a lot of hesitance on the migration and also keeping the users engaged using it (I think that most of the people can not even imagine that there is something else besides Word and Excel) and it was one of the most successful decision I had seen for the users. There is this irrational fear to stop using MS Office and to me the fear is now having to use it. I am not working with that company anymore and having to deal with Office again has been painful.
- pottertheotter 4y ago
  I just took a new job at a company that uses Workspace and it drives me nuts for two reasons. The biggest is that Sheets is awful compared to Excel. The second is having work in a browser tab. It’s so much easier to keep things organized when switching around between programs when you have an actual app.

rootsudo 4y ago

It is a weird choice, especially considering how every computer assigned to an end user is a Windows Desktop, Especially Widnows 10 as of 2017 - https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2016/05/10/ https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2016/05/10/ I can see how licensing for Office is "expensive" but this is the DoD so that should be the least concerning issue. Training is touched in the PR, but, it is not 1:1, especially for excel spreadsheets with macros, pivot tables or integration to PowerBi, which again is Office 365. I doubt FPA/Accounting and such are going to move over to Google. For tech, same ,I don't see it happening. I could see an excuse as "more secure" as the identity is entirely cloud based, and you don't need to label/track content via Azure AIP/DRM'ish and it's easily accessibly within google, but that is entirely possible on O365 after it's tuned for that. I also am curious about general mail routing and such, no more exchange? No more outlook? (Well, I guess you could use outlook via imap, but then again what's the point?) This PR just has me asking more questions, especially since all of the options AFAIK for gsuite require an active internet connection and a modern/newer browser. The same org that uses Panasonic Toughbooks, is going to have a have to use an "offline" mode of gsuite.

mnholt 4y ago
This is almost certainly a proof of concept based on language in the PR. The Government should always keep a pulse on the market and be willing to buck the status quo. Office is the standard now, but GSuite could be so in 15 years.
- sirjaz 4y ago
  God I hope not. GSuite is a resource hog, well almost any webapp is. Also, it makes it more insecure. It is always better to have native apps that work off-line than a webapp
  - judge2020 4y ago
    How is it more insecure?
    - 4y ago

rhacker 4y ago

I know I shouldn't type this but isn't it weird that Google remains the last tech giant that hasn't had a major breach. I mean small breaches based on CSRF issues and what not, but nothing like those million record breaches that EVERYONE is afflicted by. Probably part of the reason the Army chose Google. I think I would normally disagree with a govt. agency using a cloud platform, but it might actually be MORE secure than what they can do themselves.

walrus01 4y ago
Depends if you consider the NSA breaching their inter-data-center traffic 15+ years ago or not.
- ericmay 4y ago
  No reason to really consider that as relevant here since if you consider it then you also have to consider that they’ve breached not only every potential contractor for the USG but also any company that matters.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - feanaro 4y ago
    > but also any company that matters. Wow, that's pretty loaded. Is this some kind of no true Scotsman situation?
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Huh? No.
    - ericmay 4y ago
      I mean every big tech company of course: Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, etc. but also they're going to have backdoors into companies like Boeing or perhaps 3M, banks, etc. "Matters" in this context was related to national security concerns.

mtgx 4y ago

faizshah 4y ago

I feel like people are missing some context here, this isn’t about Google Workspace vs Office 365. After the JEDI contract controversy, the DoD switched strategies to procure from multiple cloud vendors: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/release/article/2682992/future-of-the-joint-enterprise-defense-infrastructure-cloud-contract/ https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/release/article/268299...

jeffcore 4y ago
More specifically, this looks like an answer to the Army's Office 365 licensing woes, which initially did not include licenses for these 250,000 junior soldiers to cut costs: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/07/14/gmail-fix-for-junior-soldiers-army-launches-google-email-beta/ https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/07/14/gmail-fi...
- dismalpedigree 4y ago
  Right. So now they will have two systems that can’t work well together. Brilliant!
  - solardev 4y ago
    That's OK, next year's budget will include funding for a third service to bridge them together for three times the cost.
    - crakenzak 4y ago
      Hey, as long as its the taxpayers money they're wasting who cares, right!
  - kube-system 4y ago
    You’re assuming they need to work together. The Army is huge.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    Yeah, but also, I'll bet you in a couple of years the next offer from Microsoft will come with a steep discount on Office licenses.

amnamrizvi1 4y ago

why is my comment not showing when i log out or use another browser? :(

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smegsicle 4y ago
your comments were shadowed "[dead]" probably because you are posting from a new account you can enable viewing others' dead comments with 'showdead' in your account settings
- amnamrizvi1 4y ago

bcardarella 4y ago

Does anyone actually think this is endorsement? At this point Google is the 2022 version of 1998 Microsoft. Big, slow, and dumb. We all know we're getting fucked by them yet not hard enough to quit yet. Soon.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
Could we even quit? I tried to use Proton Mail and all my emails on a brand new account, even to my own gmail, went to spam. :(
- colordrops 4y ago
  Hmm, I'm using Proton Mail with a personal domain and it's working fine.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Like Printing, Email is becoming less and less important. In my personal life I almost never use email for communication, it is prominent in business for now but even that is shifting
- djkoolaide 4y ago
  I know it's "shilled" here all the time, but I've had zero issues with Fastmail.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Fastmail works well
- mysterypie 4y ago
  In same vein some e-commerce sites and payment processors secretly distrust commercial email services and don't tell you that they've blacklisted your email provider. You go to make a car or flight reservation, enter all kinds of info including your credit card, and then bam, it says "Oops, something went wrong, try again later". Or an e-commerce site asks you to enter your email and they'll send you a confirmation code, but the confirmation email never comes. I've determined by experiment--using a different IP but a Gmail email address--that a frequent cause is a secret bias against commercial email services. It's particularly infuriating because I think a commercial email user with a paid account is a much lower fraud risk than a free Gmail user.

tonfreed 4y ago

Starting a sweep for when Google shuts down the Army's account and they can't find anyone to help them.

LASR 4y ago
They can always tweet for support and hope it goes viral for someone to notice.

devoutsalsa 4y ago

I hope Google doesn’t disable the account of an essential person in a time of crisis.

joecool1029 4y ago
Eagerly awaiting military leadership posting about this on HN: 'Ask HN: Locked out of account, overseas Google support keeps leading us in circles' That or soldiers getting reprimanded because accidental auto-responder was like 'Haha!' or 'Great!' to something requiring a deeper response.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  > accidental auto-responder This stuff can be dangerous. My son asked me a question in chat and my phone somehow auto-responded a "No" answer. I'm guessing I put my phone in my pocket without locking it. Luckily I caught it in time and as soon as that happened I disabled all auto-responding features.
  - notimetorelax 4y ago
    Same story for Apple Watch. A wrong answer is one misclick away. All auto response should only type the response and wait the usual send command.
wil421 4y ago
If they run their algos on anything grunts are uploading it’s going to cause some headache. My ex-Marine friends claimed there was crazy stuff on the military share drives that were accessible by anyone on the network.

poof131 4y ago

So glad to see this. Military IT has been atrocious. I viewed the Navy Marine Corp Internet (NMCI) as damn near treasonous levels of awful when I got out a decade ago and assumed little improvement with the way contracts are done and the entrenched vendors. Happy to see Google win this not just because I prefer the solution now to MS, but that some change is happening. I still can’t believe we spent $7T on the global war on terror and no one is asking questions.

sure_about_that 4y ago
== I still can’t believe we spent $7T on the global war on terror and no one is asking questions.== Everyone who asked before we started that “war” was called a traitor.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- jti107 4y ago
  dont forget the tax cuts and bailouts for big business that is added to the US national debt. currently at 31 trillion...but investing in education and healthcare for normal people is socialism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - exq 4y ago
    Student load forgiveness is socialism, but hundreds of billions in PPP loans with no obligation to repay is "stimulating the economy" Classy.
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      The government shut down businesses so it makes sense to compensate them. The government didn't force people to go the college or take out loans to pay for it.
      - 4y ago

helf 4y ago

Yeah, no thanks. I work in a company that has forced Workspaces upon us and it randomly is a nightmare. Tons of functionality you get in Excel is not there. It is a complete nightmare adjusting access to random files. You often end up with files and folders "owned" by a user who no longer exists and then we have to get the central IT to go fix it. Ugh. Everything being browser based with crap desktop clients is the worst. They also want to constantly share crap via Google Drive and, unless I have missed something major, you can't run Google Drive, in Windows at least, under multiple signed in users with the same drive letter. You'll just get access denied errors. THAT makes shortcuts and all a complete fucking nightmare. I have to often shrug when my users have issues and send in a report to the Japanese head office and hope they respond timely. I know /that/ isn't a workspaces fault, but it just compounds things.

Waterluvian 4y ago
Google Sheets is wonderful in countless ways. It’s so handy to have multiplayer spreadsheets. But anyone who thinks it’s a drop-in replacement for Excel is a fool.
- helf 4y ago
  Right? I mean, like I said, a lot of the complaints I have aren't really the fault of Workspaces. We actually use the multiuser functionality of Sheets a lot but I still run into constant issues. And the fact a huge chunk of this crap does /not/ play nice with /multi-user local workstations/, in 2022, drives me bonkers.
- yodon 4y ago
  Office 365 provides multiplayer spreadsheets, in addition to a great desktop client, and the ability to work in-browser if you prefer.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Cool I should give that a try. But a decade ago that didn’t exist and for undergrad and grad school Sheets was amazing. I almost did my dissertation in Docs but decided to use Pages instead (which was simpler than Word but a few times lacked what I needed… if I could do it again I’d of used Word)

khana 4y ago

plaidfuji 4y ago

“Hey who’s xjinping@ccp.cn? Do they really need Editor access to the East Asia Strategy shared drive? Ah crap I accidentally clicked accept”

laweijfmvo 4y ago
Luckily Google's blocked in China /s
idealmedtech 4y ago
Can you imagine if there was one authoritative shared folder where the comprehensive strategy docs lived? Ah, an efficient government, what a dream!
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Security through bureaucracy :)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bpodgursky 4y ago
I mean the whole point of workspace is that the admin can set policies that disallow this (or at least require admin approval). https://support.google.com/a/answer/60781?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/60781?hl=en
anshumankmr 4y ago
Though you may joke, I 100% feel its likely someone from the CCP is going to try hacking someone’s account through social engineering. Which makes me wonder will the US Army store top secret files on their workspace.
- potatoman22 4y ago
  The press release says its only for controlled unclassified information, so ideally they wouldn't store top secret docs

mupuff1234 4y ago

Seems like a good start to break the dependency on windows.

andrewguenther 4y ago

So the Army uses it but if you're a government contractor you can't use it because you can't get a NIST 800-53 or CMMC compliant configuration on Workspace... Before anyone tells me that Workspace is FedRAMP compliant: Yes, I know, but they do not expose the controls necessary for non-government users to be compliant.

milesward 4y ago
We've been delivering on that by adding Virtru, if you want help with it, miles@sada.com
nine_k 4y ago
For those of us who are not well versed in these standards, could you describe, or just bane, some crucial parts that would be needed for compliance but are missing?

alberth 4y ago

The Army also has some embarrassing past use of Google Workspace. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/david-petraeus-was-brought-down-by-gmail/265057/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/david...

judge2020 4y ago
That's gmail. Hardly similar to the IT control powerhouse that is Google Workspace (but as a SAML service provider, ie. their user auth is still handled on the backend by internal systems. They aren't moving user auth to Google).

redler 4y ago

On the positive side of the ledger, this slightly decreases the likelihood of Google shutting it down.

EricE 4y ago
Ha! As if...
elnr 4y ago
It, however, does not impact the chance of Google renaming it again. I look forward for the day when we come full circle and they re-name it Google Apps for Business, Government, Education, and Grandma Bertha.

arthurcolle 4y ago

Has anyone had issues with normal INDEX/MATCH stuff in Google Sheets? I was actually OK with moving from Excel to Google Sheets since the coverage of functions seemed mostly ok, minus all the new cool shit they added in one of the more recent releases (XLOOKUP, etc) but I literally tried a trivial INDEX/MATCH with a simple 5x20 matrix of price values and literally could not get it to work even though the identical "code" worked in Excel. Really, really frustrating. I was working at a hedge fund at the time and I was simultaneously working on a real time portfolio dashboard as a web app, and needed to also have a stopgap solution in the form of a spreadsheet for people to play with and debugging differences in Google's spreadsheet function implementations and Excel's was infuriating

jimmygrapes 4y ago
IME in a similar industry, Google Sheets is to (desktop) Excel what a $30 Casio USB "MIDI" keyboard is to a Craigslist Steinway
qntmfred 4y ago
nope. i tend to use QUERY() in sheets these days anyways. more versatile
- arthurcolle 4y ago
  I'll check this out, thanks.
RockingGoodNite 4y ago
No one really uses spreadsheets any more except as nicer CSV outputs.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Sure they don't. Not everything is ML and datascience. You'd be surprised what untrained people who like to experiment can cobble together in offices.

filoeleven 4y ago

No one has mentioned the Pinkertons yet, so I guess I should. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

randlet 4y ago
I'm aware of some of the history of the Pinkerton's but what is the connection to this story?
stjohnswarts 4y ago
what in the world does that have to do with a google contract with the army?

exabrial 4y ago

I’m sure the army would love to be in the middle of a fight and get prompted with a bunch of popups to install chrome and other dumb crap they pull

SadTrombone 4y ago
What Google products do you foresee being used in the middle of a firefight?
- dismalpedigree 4y ago
  US Military fights wars using powerpoint. Seriously. Every brief. Every situation deserves a presentation. So now it will be PowerPoint AND googles version
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    That’s used by command post and headquarters staff - not people doing the fighting.
    - dismalpedigree 4y ago
      Command post includes a lieutenant making a mission brief or conducting training for a group of 20 privates. Privates are not often authoring power points, but they are definitely consuming them. Sharing isn’t going to work. Its going to be all email all the time.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Does this mean google won't kill off the service?

judge2020 4y ago
They were never going to kill anything related to Google Workspace, but certain non-essential products do get sunsetted and deprecated eventually, eg. https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/02/currents-spaces-migration.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/02/currents-spa...
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Might greatly increase it's chances as the US government can say "nuh-uh-uh" on things concerning national security. While google is big, they aren't that big to shutdown the US army's internet.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

Great news everyone: Google might not cancel Google Workspace without at least a year's notice now.

jvolkman 4y ago
Google itself is totally reliant on Workspace so it's not going anywhere.

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago

Can we start a petition against Google? Surely we can get enoygh support from engineers and developers to get the message across that using Google services is a bad idea.

judge2020 4y ago
> using Google services is a bad idea Could you elaborate?

imwillofficial 4y ago

Hope it sticks around

ericd 4y ago

I'm always impressed at how difficult the Workspace Admin Console makes doing literally anything. It's like I'm thrown into a database with an aggressively denormalized schema and expected to figure out how to piece together complete records by hand via queries.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Except that you can't query across anything, because that would be useful. One of my "acid tests" for a well-designed UI is if integrates metrics with configuration. For example, VMware will show cute little inline bar charts of CPU and Memory utilisation when browsing virtual machines. Similarly, some firewall or load-balancer products will show "hit counters" or similar stats next to rules or virtual servers. For the other 99% of products out there, it's up to the end user to manually perform the "join" by clicking around the GUI. There may be an API, or a scripting tool, but without fail these won't provide a robust link (a foreign key) that would actually make this easy.
profwalkstr 4y ago
It still many orders of magnitude better than Office 365 admin interface though. What a sad state of affairs.

lostgame 4y ago

Always boggles the mind how companies are proud of be part of an industry of systematic murder. Fun.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Systematic murder is an extremely profitable industry to be in, and companies are first and foremost proud to be making oodles of money. In a battle between Googlers who have the mistaken impression Google is run by good people and the Googlers who make the company tons of money by signing big government contracts, the latter will win every single time.

mercy_dude 4y ago

It’s not surprising at all. Current administration has setup a revolving door with quite a few Google execs working in the administration. Eric Schmidt is known to have done fundraising in 2020.

RockingGoodNite 4y ago
That reminds me I'm an idiot for defending Google in this.

Schnitz 4y ago

phantom_of_cato 4y ago

The military-industrial complex [1] on full display. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military–industrial_complex

master_crab 4y ago

So Google offered the Army 250k workspaces for pennies on the dollar. Good for them. And good for the Army. Maybe now MSFT won’t charge DoD as much for 365 again. Sounds like a typical day in the cloud wars. Let’s see what happens when renegotiations come up for the contract.

pmorici 4y ago

I don’t understand why the new mail.mil doesn’t have an option for email only without the Office 365 apps. Seems like that would solve the cost issue.

throwaway892238 4y ago

Late last year Google got FedRAMP High certification for Workspaces and Public Cloud. What this means is that, rather than have to use a "Government" version of Office365, and a "Government" version of AWS, and potentially even other versions for contractors, you can instead just use regular Google services for everything, at the highest levels. Managing different vendors and products and clearance is a nightmare. This is a potential game changer.

redanddead 4y ago
Google: Nationalized-lite?
andrewguenther 4y ago
No no no no no. This is not true. Google Workspace is FedRAMP compliant for government customers. It is NOT possible to configure Google Workspace in a FedRAMP compliant way as a regular customer. You can't even get NIST 800-171 on Google Workspace without additional tools.
- throwaway892238 4y ago
  It looks like two provisions it doesn't natively support, but you can slap on a 3rd party tool and you're in business. This is still much better than using two completely different vendors for your collaboration and cloud tools.
  - andrewguenther 4y ago
    For NIST, yes. For FedRAMP, no.
- topkai22 4y ago
  Yeah, and the whole certification process is way more complex than that. To use the example I’m familiar with, Azure as a whole is FedRAMP High for all US regions. However, if you need to you need to handle DoD IL5 data or justice data, you need to go to Azure Government because they have even stricter personnel screening requirements than FedRAMP. Except the DoD didn’t like sharing a region even with other US Government customers, so there are also a exclusive DoD regions as well. That’s not because Microsoft is trying to market segment. Turns out different parts of the government love making things hard on their suppliers by insisting they are special. I seriously doubt google actually manages to negotiate the minefield that is contracting and CISOs with conflicting requirements like the GP is dreaming of, but cool if they can.

unknownaccount 4y ago

That’s too bad. They should of chosen Nextcloud.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

This is a really really bad idea. The military should never be beholden to a corporation like this for basic day to day operations. It will bite them in the future and probably at the worst possible time.

galacticaactual 4y ago
Yeah you should tell all the Windows and Office users in the DOD that.
thehappypm 4y ago
Still better than them trying to use some insecure alternative that is way less productive.

low_tech_punk 4y ago

Also in the news: (2021) German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice. Ref: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-state-planning-to-switch-25000-pcs-to-libreoffice/ https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/11/18/german-s...

kornhole 4y ago

Meanwhile across the Atlantic in Europe, Google and Microsoft are being removed from classrooms, governments, and military agencies in favor of open source private clouds such as Nextcloud with Collabora office. This is due to GDPR and data sovereignty. Private clouds is what these companies fear as features mature.

MiguelX413 4y ago
Based Europe
ifqwz 4y ago
Europeans being forced to use inferior products is not the win that you think it is.
- kornhole 4y ago
  Superior data sovereignty and control of the environments is the driver. Some user features are inferior but are being improved with the participation of the user community that includes the IT staffs of the customer organizations who can create add on apps and pull requests to the main code base.

rishabhd 4y ago

Probably they never evaluated support as part of the equation.

karmasimida 4y ago

I mean at last? No self-inflicted red tapes, now Google is a normal company

voisin 4y ago

Boy they’ll be disappointed with Google randomly decides to cancel the product with no explanation. But hey, here’s eight new chat apps.

greesil 4y ago

This is hosted on Google servers?

Gasp0de 4y ago

What happened to "Don't be evil"?

herewulf 4y ago

Where can I DX Outlook, OneDrive, and Teams for this?!

antony565 4y ago

forgotpwd16 4y ago

It's gonna be funny if Google's algorithm ever decides to ban them.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Dear serving US Army personnel, We’re writing to let you know that the Google Workspace Active Conflict Service will be discontinued from noon today at which point your access to your maps, targeting systems, intelligence feeds, supply logistics and battle command will no longer be available. As of that date, issued equipment will be unable to connect to the Google Active Conflict Service and existing connections will be shut down. After cursory deliberation it has been decided that customers would be better served by partners (in Russia and China) which specialise in this segment. What do I need to do? We recommend that you take action urgently to migrate your arse out of any theatre of conflict post-haste. Good luck and thank you for supporting Google products.

stared 4y ago

- Did you share it with vlad@putin.gov.ru?! - Sorry, a misclick. - OK, NP.

workingon 4y ago

Great. We just finally got teams where it isn't complete dogshit and now this! It's awesome that we funnel tons of money to tech companies instead of raising federal government scientist salaries to be competitive enough to just retain the expertise for ourselves!

Kalanos 4y ago

Google proceeds to cancel Workspace next year

indymike 4y ago

Every time my brother in law who is an NCO in the Army comes to visit, it takes about 30 minutes for his laptop to boot up to the point he can log in to do anything. I'm amazed that this is acceptable.