Privacy. The only people that have access to your documents are staff from your own institution, whereas, with a product like Google Docs your documents reside on a server in Google's Datacenter, where administrators from their staff will have access to them (whether they access them or not, either benignly or maliciously).
I was once part of a discussion about transitioning to Gmail. One of our staff members raised the point that Google does read your email, semantically, when they provide advertising within the Gmail interface. Which raises questions about how this information is indexed and stored. Google Translation which uses statistical machine translation, which requires massive quantities of linguistic data, and the more data they have in each language improves their translation abilities. Are our emails and documents helping to provide a corps of data? I don't want to be a naysayer, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. Chad Petrovay ?| ?Collections Database Administrator MIM-Musical Instrument Museum | 4725 E. Mayo Boulevard ?| Phoenix, AZ 85050 480.478.6000 main ?| ?480.478.6058 direct | 480.471.8690 fax ?| www.themim.org -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stanley Smith Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:07 PM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Google Apps After using Google Apps and Google Docs for a couple of weeks on a specific project, I have to ask: Why on earth would anyone ever again spend a dime on Microsoft Office? Stanley Smith Manager, Imaging Services J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1000 Los Angeles, CA 90049-1687 (310) 440-7286 _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/
