Google

Google is moving further into Microsoft’s Azure territory with new SQL features for the enterprise.

An update to SharePoint Online for some Office 365 tenants clashed with Google’s determination to move from SHA-1 to SHA-2 as the basis for securing web sites. The symptom is that Chrome flags SharePoint sites as “Not Secure”, which is a pretty worrying thing for an Office 365 administrator to see. Fortunately, Microsoft is reversing the update out to fix the problem.

Fiat Chrysler announced today that it has partnered with Google to bring Android to its car dashboards. The move appears unrelated to Google’s Android Auto solution.

The news that Office 365 achieved 99.99% availability in the last quarter comes as no real surprise. As cloud services become ever more massive, it becomes harder for any incident to affect a service’s SLA in any meaningful way.

This week’s snippets span the tenth anniversary of PowerShell, a survey indicating that Office 365 has a solid lead in deployments over G Suite, Windows 10 Mobile finally gets the new authenticator app, Outlook starts to look like mini-CRM, why dynamic groups don’t work for Teams and Planner, and an interesting document from Microsoft describing Office 365 tenant isolation.

Google is finally making a serious move into the enterprise and cloud spaces; a series of announcements over the last year highlight this new initiative.

Google is continuing to expand its infastracutre to better compete with Amazon and Microsoft; Gartner is starting to recognize the company’s new initiatives and has listed them as a visionary.

The European Commission this morning announced a third set of antitrust charges against Google, formally accusing the search giant with abusing its advertising and shopping services.

Because Google is apparently taking over the world, this edition of Short Takes focuses on Microsoft’s Bing Concierge Bot, two weeks of Google v. Oracle at trial, Google claims that Chromebooks outsold Macs in the US in Q1, Google appeals French order to take “right to be forgotten” worldwide, Google patents fly paper for pedestrians.

As expected, the European Union’s European Commission formally charged Google with violating antitrust laws by forcing its hardware maker and wireless carrier partners to bundle its own apps and services in the dominant Android mobile OS.