Microsoft Wins California By DefaultMicrosoft Wins California By Default

When the State of California put a revamp of its 200,000-user email system up for bid, it seemed like another opportunity for Google to grab territory that has typically been owned by Microsoft. Then Google saw the requirements, and cried foul.The problem, at least for Google, was that the state wrote its bid proposal with the views and biases of desktop application users. For example, the proposal specified that the inbox needed to be sortable by column, such as date, sender, or subject. That's not the way Google's web-based client works; it's always sorted in reverse chronological order but the search allows lets you find the message you want very quickly. Contrast that with Outlook, which has dismal search abilities but offers column sorting to simplify visual scans of a folder. It's a different way of working, and it was written into the proposal.

Web based mail encourages a different way of working. Sure you can tag and organize mail into folders, but you don't need to organize things that way. If you are lazy, just leave it all in the inbox and use the search function. We've all probably known people who treat Outlook the same way and leave hundreds of emails in their inbox, but it doesn't work nearly as well and can take a lot of digging to find that needle in the mail stack.

GMail lets you archive off emails as you've dealt with them and only leave to-do items in the inbox. It also allows tagging, but to tell you the truth I rarely use those features. The search is so effective that it's not necessary to do a lot of before-the-fact organization. You can argue those points until you're blue in the face, but the fact is that it's a change from what many users have learned and used for years. Once that yardstick of email was enshrined in the proposal, GMail didn't measure up. As a result, Google knew it was whipped and didn't even bother to bid on the contract.

I was somewhat puzzled that Google didn't try to bid the contract using Mozilla Thunderbird as a desktop client, backed by the IMAP protocol. That would give users the ability to use either web or desktop access to their mail. It might increase the complexity and cost of maintaining the system, and perhaps that was a factor. Still, that type of transitional plan may still be the best way to go for many organizations. Thunderbird is a great desktop alternative to Outlook for companies that aren't wedded to Exchange on the back-end server.