Out of all other Google services, Google Apps is the product with the most potential to put a dent in Microsoft’s earnings if it ever took off. As seen in the recent past, both companies will do almost anything to one-up the other–and that should worry Microsoft.

Google has been throwing pebbles (Google Sites, Google Apps Team Edition, and Postini), but there could be one boulder in their arsenal they are just waiting to hurl–the Google Apps Appliance. Google already has an "appliance" for the enterprise, but the only thing it does right now is search. The Google Apps Appliance could be an upgrade to that, or something completely new that is designed to plug right into your existing IT infrastructure. This could be the enterprise home run they have been looking for.

Microsoft is trying to put the kibosh on more of its internal email messages around its Vista marketing plans going public.

As Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Todd Bishop blogged on March 7, Microsoft is appealing the decision to turn the "Vista-capable" lawsuit lodged last year into a full-blown class-action case.

Any takeover bid for peripherals maker Logitech by Microsoft would be "an operation without sense," Logitech’s chairman was quoted as saying in an Italian newspaper on Sunday. Shares in Swiss-based Logitech rose in January based on speculation Microsoft would launch a takeover bid. Analysts dismissed rumors of an $8 billion takeover bid.

Logitech is the market leader in PC mice, while Microsoft is its biggest competitor with "30 percent of our market," Logitech Chairman Guerrino De Luca told Corriere della Sera in an interview. When asked whether Microsoft had bought any stake in Logitech, De Luca replied: "It would not be opportune seeing as we are competitors."

This might actually be a first for us. It’s a big story.

It’s official: Daylight Saving Time is a bust. Designed (and recently extended) as a measure to save energy in a period of inflated electricity prices, an in-depth University of California study has now shown that ##DST doesn’t save anyone any money at all. In fact, it’s costing consumers extra,## to the tune of $3.19 in extra utility bills per year.

The study was made possible because of the peculiarities of the state of Indiana, which was only partially on DST until 2006. When the whole state finally went DST (to sync with the national business day), some comparisons vs. the prior method were made apparent. The study calculated that the shift costs Indiana residents an extra $8.6 million in electricity bills in total.http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/null/83073

They operate from a bare apartment on a Chinese island. They are intelligent 20-somethings who seem harmless. But they are hard-core hackers who claim to have gained access to the world’s most sensitive sites, including the Pentagon. In fact, they say they are sometimes paid secretly by the Chinese government–a claim the Beijing government denies.

"No Web site is one hundred percent safe. There are Web sites with high-level security, but there is always a weakness," says Xiao Chen, the leader of this group."Xiao Chen" is his online name. Along with his two colleagues, he does not want to reveal his true identity. The three belong to what some Western experts say is a civilian cyber militia in China, launching attacks on government and private Web sites around the world.

Microsoft said it plans to address four critical bulletins for vulnerabilities in Office on its upcoming patch day March 11.

In a security bulletin, Microsoft said Thursday there are four critical remote code execution flaws in Office, which is regularly under attack.

Think you can get away with abusing email and Intenet policies at work? A new study says, "heck no."

More than a quarter of employers have fired workers for misusing email and one-third have fired workers for misusing the Internet, according to the 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute in a survey of 304 U.S. companies.

Of the 28 percent of employers who have fired workers for email misuse, they did so because it violated company policy (64 percent), contained inappropriate or offensive language (62 percent), it was used excessively by the employee (26 percent) or breached confidentiality rules (22 percent) according the study’s results.

This interesting article by Rick Robertson discusses the goals of email branding, the reasoning behind it, the desired impact and perceived barriers to implementation. It will also look at best practices for enacting an email-branding protocol across the organization and provide some technical tips on how to create impressive email signatures and disclaimers that incorporate photos and other dynamic elements without stressing bandwidth and email-storage requirements.

Read this OutlookPower article.

Google just updated their "What’s New" page with information about a yet unreleased feature that will let you sync your Outlook calendar with Gmail and vice versa. This is a huge feature that Google Calendar users have been missing–and even more-so for enterprise Google Apps users.