Glitch hits Google's credibility

Google's recent Gmail outage was certainly an inconvenience to customers, but the bigger blow was dealt to the Internet company's credibility as a hosted e-mail provider, reports InformationWeek.

Google touts its Web mail as a better alternative to Microsoft's Exchange server and other on-premises e-mail systems. So Tuesday's two-and-a-half hour outage, experienced by paying businesses, as well as consumers using the free service, is an embarrassment.

"It's damaging to their credibility, and it puts in a tough position those folks that made a strategic bet in moving off of Exchange," Sheri McLeish, analyst for Forrester Research, told InformationWeek yesterday.

US Internet firm Yahoo is "not opposed" to doing a deal that would potentially sell its search business, chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen said yesterday, says Reuters.

But he said the search business is deeply intertwined with Yahoo's other online products and properties, and so any deal, whether a partnership or a sale, would be done for the right reasons and the right economics.

"It's extremely difficult to draw a line down the middle of the organisation and split it into two pieces," Jorgensen told the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference.

The government has pledged to accelerate use of open source software as it seeks new ways to prevent overspending in public-sector IT projects, according to FT.com.

Open source software is typically available for free, as it is made by a community of voluntary developers, which anybody can join. That lowers development costs and means no single organisation owns the “source code” underlying the products, as traditional software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle or SAP do.

As a result, the up-front costs of open source software are lower and the wider availability of experts to support the technology once it is installed increases choice and control for IT departments. However, the costs of that support over the lifetime of the product are not always cheaper than traditional “proprietary” software.

Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer said the company's legal action against TomTom over Linux was specific to that company, but he declined to say whether other suits over the open source operating system might follow.

"I wouldn't speculate at this point," Horacio Gutierrez told CNET News in an interview late yesterday. Gutierrez did add that Microsoft's patent suit against TomTom, which includes three claims related to file management techniques used in the Linux kernel, was specific to that company.

It is the "TomTom implementation of the Linux kernel that infringes these claims," Gutierrez said. "There are many flavours of Linux [and] many implementations of the Linux kernel. Cases such as these are very fact-specific."