Microsoft Unfazed by Google Office Threat
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PC Magazine - Microsoft's Office team downplayed the threat from Google's Web-based word processing and spreadsheet applications, saying they are unlikely to appeal to corporate customers.
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Google will make the software programs available offline, in a move that will challenge Microsoft and its office productivity tools.
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Microsoft faces heavy opposition in the quest to gain approval for its document format. In Monkey Bites.
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Stoopid human Improved technology and design alone will not be enough to keep Windows Vista and Office 2007 users safe from hackers and identity thieves, according to Bill Gates.â¦
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Google Docs, a Web-based platform for creating, sharing, storing, and publishing documents, has offered capabilities for word processing and creating spreadsheets, but it was missing a major piece of the Microsoft Office puzzle --  until now. On Monday, Google added business presentation software, the element that many analysts said was preventing the Web-based office suite from contending with Office on a larger scale.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's Office software is under attack again, this time with anÂ unpatched flaw in the Windows 2000 version of Office 2000 being usedÂ by hackersÂ to run unauthorized software on a victim's computer. Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that the bug exists, but it would not say when it plans to fix the problem. The critical vulnerability wasÂ first reported by SymantecÂ to users of its DeepSight threat notification service. Attackers are exploiting the flaw by sending malicious Word documents to victims, Symantec said. When these documents are opened, Word is tricked into installing malicious software on the PC. Symantec is calling this malware Trojan.MDropper. Trojan.MDropper installs malicious software on the computer, which in turn installs another Trojan horse program "which turns out to be new variant of Backdoor.Femo," Symantec said in an Web posting. Symantec testers had not been able to exploit the problem on more up-to-date versions of Office or Windows. On Tuesday Microsoft said that the bug was confined to Microsoft Word 2000. Microsoft is investigating the issue and may issue a patch once that investigation is completed, according to the company's public relations agency. Microsoft has spent a lot of timeÂ investigating and patching Office applications this year. Over the past few months there have been several reports concerning very targeted attacks, similar to this latest Office issue. Microsoft's last few security updatesÂ have been filled with patches for Office flaws, many of which had already been used in attacks.
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A top Microsoft executive defended desktop application software, the source of the company&#39;s revenue for three decades, arguing on Tuesday that even services-based companies such as Google still need it.The comments by Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft&#39;s business applications division, come as Microsoft is trying to position itself as a company capable of delivering applications over the Internet as well as on PCs, its traditional distribution model.&quot;It&#39;s interesting some our competitors who like to espouse the idea that software is dead,&quot; said Raikes said. &quot;I think they&#39;re worried that actually people like a lot of what they have at their fingertips and the real success is to use a combination.&quot;Microsoft has come under increasing pressure from companies such as Salesforce.com, which specializes in Web-based CRM (customer relationship management) applications and Google, whose&#160;Docs suite is an online alternative to Microsoft&#39;s Office suite. Web-based applications tend to be cheaper, easier to update and require little installation since applications are delivered through a Web browser.Raikes claimed during a keynote to about 3,300 customers and partners at its Convergence conference that only Microsoft can deliver &quot;the best of the traditional software model in combination with software as a service.&quot;Later, Raikes said Google realized its Web-based applications need further enhancement on the desktop by introducing Google Gears, a set of open-source tools to build applications that can run offline and then sync when a computer comes back online.&quot;It&#39;s fascinating to me to see that even some of those companies now are trying to backtrack on what we&#39;ve been saying and to offer things like Gears in order to be able to be offline and or take advantage of global computing power,&quot; Raikes said.Microsoft is using the desktop products such as Outlook e-mail and Internet Explorer as the user interface for hosted versions of its business applications. The big push at the Convergence conference is for the forthcomingrelease of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, previously known by its code-name Titan. It will come in both on-premise and hosted versions.Microsoft, which started its business applications division in 2001, now has 475,000 users of its CRM products in 11,000 customer companies, Raikes said. In its fourth quarter, Microsoft added 85,000 new users, he said.&#160;
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Microsoft apparently yanks promos that peddled 'security fix' through misleading threats.
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Microsoft has been forced to adopt a new strategy for a different kind of threat than it has confronted, and usually dispatched, in the past.
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Software giant confirms that a critical vulnerability exists in Microsoft Office 2000.
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MS Office hijack hi-jinks An unpatched Microsoft Word 2000 vulnerability is being actively exploited by hackers to spread malware.â¦
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Google is releasing a new edition of its hosted applications suite that end-users can bring into the workplace without the involvement of their IT department.It means that IT managers who fret about employees using unauthorized software at work will have another tool to worry about, especially in industries where information management is heavily regulated, like health care and finance.The new release, called Google Apps Team Edition, is due to be available Thursday for free. It is aimed at employees who are interested in using Google Apps but whose employers haven&#39;t signed up for it, said Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.Team Edition contains the core communication and collaboration services and applications from other editions, like the word processor, spreadsheet, Start page, Talk instant messaging, and calendar, but not Gmail, which requires IT participation to re-route the company&#39;s e-mail flow.So far, more than 500,000 mostly small organizations have signed up for Google Apps, but the other versions -- Standard, Education, Partner, and Premier -- require IT to implement the suite because its services are linked to an organization&#39;s Internet domain.That changes with the Team Edition, which will let employees set up Google Apps workgroups as long as they have valid e-mail addresses with their organizations&#39; domains, Sheth said.&quot;Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement,&quot; Sheth said.Once signed up with Team Edition, people can see who else in their organization&#39;s Internet domain is also a user, and invite those who aren&#39;t, Sheth said.&quot;It provides a quick way for workgroups to start collaborating,&quot; he said.IT departments shouldn&#39;t get angry about Team Edition, according to Sheth, because, unlike other software that employees use without IT approval, it provides an upgrade path to IT-manageable versions.&quot;The IT department always has the option to sign up for the Standard Edition for free if they want to provide control over this,&quot; Sheth said. &quot;This is a solid, happy medium.&quot;Team Edition can also be upgraded to the other editions, like Education, which is free, and Premier, which costs $50 per user per year. Although Gmail isn&#39;t part of Team Edition, Google is exploring ways to make it a part, Sheth said.By its very nature as a Web-hosted software suite, an unmanaged Google Apps deployment can represent a concern for IT departments, since the applications and the data generated are stored outside organizations&#39; firewalls in Google data centers.However, Team Edition will be far from alone among the hosted software that employees use in their organizations without getting approval from the IT department, said Erica Driver, a Forrester Research analyst.The IT department reactions to Team Edition will depend on the organization&#39;s culture, which range from those in &quot;lockdown mode&quot; to those more tolerant and aware that Web 2.0 technologies are seeping in from the consumer world to the workplace, Driver said.Team Edition, with its bottom-up, end-user-driven focus, fits in with Google&#39;s traditional strategy of appealing to individuals, grown out of its consumer services, and will likely boost the adoption of Google Apps in companies, government agencies, educational institutions and other organizations that don&#39;t currently use the suite, said Matt Cain, a Gartner analyst.&quot;The Google model is to prime the well at the end-user level and assist IT somewhere along the way, but the demand generation for the suite will definitely be at the rank-and-file level, not at the IT level,&quot; Cain said.Google needs to make sure it strikes a balance between rallying end-users and giving IT managers a way to enter the picture and exert control, he said. &quot;Google will encourage end-user adoption but it can&#39;t disintermediate the IT staff, which will have to ultimately clean up any mess that&#39;s created,&quot; Cain said.
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Executives in Microsoft's Office division seem to be discounting any possible threat to their business from Google's Web-based productivity software, according to Reuters. Antoine Leblond, co-head of the Office division, says the applications are not suitable for corporate use.
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Vista tops list of tech disappointments...NYT and Henry Blodget weigh in on Google's threat to Microsoft...More people are "Googling" themselves and more...
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GoogleÂs introduction this week of communications applications for enterprises has extended the software battle that has been brewing with Microsoft. And, according to analysts, it will likely prompt an aggressive response from Redmond.
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For 15 hours, e-mail addresses exposed through flaw in Google Docs' new Presentations feature, before Google fixes it.
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A security company warned on Thursday that a flaw in Microsoft Office could allow a denial-of-service attack to be executed on systems running somewhat older versions of the popular productivity suite.