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Microsoft Bids $44.6B for Yahoo

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I open up my morning reading and here is the first thing that grabs me:

Microsoft Offers $44.6 Billion for Yahoo

Of course, something of this magnitude the first place I went for comments was to the Scobleizer. After his stint at MS and his frustrated departure, I knew he would have some interesting thoughts (also a great link to all the buzz around this already).

My initial reaction is that this is a great business merger. Squeeze some huge operating efficiencies (aka, lay off alot of people) and give the combined entity a better chance to compete against Google…not say that they would be able to compete, as the result of that would be seen only a year out and there are a lot of decisions to be made between now and then that will impact the effectiveness of the merger.

I think actually making this work would be tough considering the cultural difference between the two. There would also be the potential for a large exodus of users who don’t want to support MS. Maybe a better acquirer would be Google…as if that would get past the regulators.

The Google Apps Security Hole

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Lately, I have been using Google Apps for some of my work. Started off with mail, moved to calendar, and then to docs. The hardest part of this before today was getting used to the limited capabilities within Google Docs. Today, I realized the that Google Apps has a huge security hole it it that scares the hell out of me.

There is no configuration option (that I or others have found) to force all interactions with Google Apps to be secure!

Sure, Google Apps will encrypt your password as you login in. But if you are passing sensitive information via GMail, or storing sensitive information in Google Docs, all that information will be passed over the internet in the clear! Google Apps lacks a configuration option to “encrypt all access to Google Apps”. (I’m letting the security aspect of encrypting the data on the Google servers to slide for now…one thing at a time.)

Sure, you can manually change every Google App’s URL to be encrypted (to use https), but expecting users to do this is a fallacy, users are the weakest link of the security network…they will forget and information will be passed unsecured. And some people will say that “encrypting everything is too much over head”, but that is the smallest price to pay for security. Most people don’t think of security until it is too late. If Google wants Apps to be taken as a serious service, then this is a needed price to pay.

If you are a corporate user of Google Apps, send Google a message that this hole needs to be filled! Even if you’re not a corporate user, but are a user that takes their security seriously…send the message!

In the mean time, make sure you install one of the following plug-ins in your web browser:

I now use the Firefox add-on on every computer I use. When configured properly, it will automatically change all the URLs going to Google Apps to encrypt them (to use https). I disabled all the other features of the plug-in (which I didn’t see value in).

These add-ons are not a solution to this problem. Again, they require action by the user and can also be disabled by the user (remember: weakest link in the security chain!). Google needs to add the previously described feature to Google Apps ASAP in order to provide adequate security to the users of Google Apps.

Google Analytics Gets an Update

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I have been using Google Analytics for almost a year now to track the visitors to this blog and a few other sites I have. Tonight, I was slightly surprised when I logged on to my account and saw a whole new set of graphs. Google Analytics underwent an update today:


If your a user of Google Analytics, then you’ll notice the changes right away. The changes give the Analytics’ graphs a fresher look and feel. The dashboard (the first screen you see when you choose an account) has been redesigned as well. What is nice about the new dashboard is that it shows a historic line graph of your visitors for more than just the last 7 days (like the old versions). The menu options seem to be nearly the same as before, but I haven’t fully explored the new version yet (nor fully explored the old version). The only thing that I have found that I don’t like about the new analytics is that loss of granularity. Before, I could look at the stats for a single day and see when visits to my site occurred (valuable to understand what time of day vitis happened or how shortly after a blog posting that visitors arrived). This new version seems to have lost that level of granularity, now the finest grained detail I can view is a single day’s worth of traffic.

If you don’t mind sharing your site’s traffic with Google and you have a mechanism for installing the required javascript widget on all your pages, Google Analytics is a great tool for viewing and exploring your traffic. Especially if you use Google Adwords, since they are integrated. But, once you reach a certain volume of traffic you will need to sign up for the commercial version of analytics. Until then, try it out and see what you think.

Oh, and it’s not really clear if Google use this data for any other purposes…but they don’t specifically guarantee that they don’t… (see their Terms of Services, Section 6)