Mike "TechCrunch" Arrington uses a minor Google gaffe—a Google employee mistakenly posts a story bound for her personal blog to an official Google blog—to cast a critical eye on Google's security:
Google is pushing full steam ahead with their office strategy, and their hope is to convince a lot of individuals and businesses to trust Google enough to store their documents on Google’s servers instead of their own computers, or servers under their control.
The fact that unauthorized document access is a simple password guess or government “request” away already works against them. But the steady stream of minor security incidents we’ve seen (many very recently) can also hurt Google in the long run. Running applications for businesses is serious stuff, and Google needs to be diligent about security.
I'm not one to downplay security, but some perspective here:. Microsoft has struggled with security, with much broader exposure, for years. And Oracle recently announced patches for 101 vulnerabilities in their products this quarter alone.
Still, a note of caution is appropriate; whenever one vendor's platform dominates, it creates a monoculture that works against security. It wouldn't improve things much to trade a Microsoft monoculture for a Google one.
Tags: security, Google, Microsoft, monoculture