Microsoft is one-up-ing Google by allowing enterprises to host Office software instead of forcing them to store the data at Google/Microsoft servers. Besides the obvious worry about some other company controlling your private and secure information, there are other advantages for comapnies as well.
When something goes wrong, you want to be able to fire people, and this becomes possible with self-hosted office software. Companies want to feel in control, and pushing it out to the web eliminates that control. There is nothing to stop Google/Microsoft for example in the case that the government demands data from them. In fact, this happened in the past with Yahoo and others.
In fact, who wants to depend on the internet for optimal availability? I mean, it’s the same problem with VOIP in that when your internet goes down, your business goes down with it–a recipe for serious unproductivity.
With Microsoft tanking the first step, it’s not unreasonable to think that eventually Google may bend to offer a similar service, however unlikely.
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Yahoo paid $3.6 billion dollars for the biggest non-revenue-generating site on the internet–and they finally realized they weren’t going to make money on it?
For most of us web surfers, this is a good thing. Geocity pages were cluttered with ads, and difficult to look at. And for the most part, the content on those sites were better off in a more structured setup like a wiki, or blog. It once touted as its motto “Yahoo! GeoCities: Get a web site with easy-to-use site building tools, ” but we all know that while Geocities was decent in its day, it is seriously behind the times, and lacked simplicity compared to other tools currently available.
It also appears that this is a push to force Geocities users to move to Yahoo’s paid hosting, which could be a boon-or-bust situation. Typically, people who have always had something for free, will continue to have the mentality that it should remain free, and these people are difficult to convert.
It is interesting to note that Geocities currently ranks #2 in Google for “free web hosting,” but I imagine that people will be out shopping on Google for another free web host rather than upgrading to Yahoo’s paid hosting. I guess Yahoo doesn’t need the PR they got from the free hosting, nor did they ever figure out a way to make money on free hosting, unlike many other free hosting companies in existence. Not sure about you, but I think the banner ads on Geocities were always ignored. Maybe they could have recovered it simply by running Adsense on it.
Feel free to read the rest of the Geocities shut down project.
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