There are thousands upon thousands of industrial machines the control of which has real, physical consequences and which are absolutely running Windows, in factory settings, in building control and security systems, in all kinds of settings. Remember Stuxnet? Do you think medical charting software and testing machinery control software in hospitals have no real, physical consequences? You're thinking too narrowly. And even many of the systems which are supposedly "not on the internet" get built and set up by systems which are. Nor are "windows" or "on the internet" even requirements for the vector for this problem: TIFF files through Photoshop are. Do you think there are no systems at the Pentagon, NSA, CIA, or FBI running Photoshop, and that decisions based on data in files on those networks don't involve lives potentially lost?

Except: 1) Practically nobody has CS6 yet, it is completely brand new. We're not talking about supporting Photoshop 2 or something, this is the active, in-use-in-the-world-right-now version. 2) Adobe releases major versions on a very quick schedule compared to many vendors, many of which have no obvious reason to upgrade at all from the consumer perspective. Every time I get a release notice for a new version, I have to hunt very hard to find any clear benefits. Most of the time, they put across the very strong image that they're just fishing for repeat spending by calling something a major version that really should just be an incremental upgrade.

I see what you're doing, but that's not how it really worked with IBM. In reality, what happened is some junior or mid-level guy set up a test network with some competitor's hardware to see if they could save money. When the IBM salesman stopped by, he saw this going on and immediately went two or three levels up, to the poor employee's boss's boss's boss, at the director or VP level or even C-level, and said, "Did you know that one of your employees is endangering the reliability of your operations by toying with nonstandard equipment? We can't guarantee the reliability of what you're doing in a mixed-vendor environment." Poor employee trying to save his company then has executives at a level he himself has no access to coming down on him like a ton of bricks, and has to argue to even keep his job.

Software isn't physical? That doesn't really matter. Software is used to create and run a whole lot of things that can cause people to get hurt or killed. It also controls, and can distribute or destroy, data whose distribution or loss can have real, physical consequences. Just because photo-editing software is not safety-critical doesn't mean computers, or networks, it runs on are not.

no one will probably ever know, unless they do it in some very blatant way.

Also, "they" might not be Google as a corporate policy. It might be individual employees. It might be the future owner of Google assets if a few stupid decisions bankrupt it or cause it to break up. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of promises of privacy, and this is a different sort of deal than changing chemical or paper suppliers. This is handing over, if I'm a student, faculty member, or administrator, my personal and school-related data, a lot of which is private, to an outside concern. That's a fundamentally different sort of thing to outsource than just a vendor of some supplies, and there are good reasons to be cautious about it.

Email, and to a large degree IT in general, has been this at universities since it was invented. So has, for that matter, a significant portion of the entire Internet (that portion of it run by universities). Why do you think most email technologies were developed in the first place (along with vast portions of the rest of the Internet framework)? So they could be used by the university in its research and teaching efforts. All along the way many of the most popular utilities, clients, storage technologies, and entire OS's in use by these departments have been developed and supported by university researchers. So it isn't as though this is a crazy, new idea. I don't propose that professors are spending all their time answering support emails from students. But I do think a university with a major computer science research arm not providing its own IT is like a culinary school outsourcing its cafeteria. Possible, and might save money, but kind of loses out on an operational component that could enhance both the real-world experience and the research and teaching of the place. That is completely aside from the biggest issue, however, which is handing over student and university data to outside concerns whose primary interests in an email system are at odds with those of the school or its faculty or students.

Running email is a core function like running libraries is a core function, as they serve very similar purposes in a university environment. And email isn't even close to done, cooked, finished, anyway. The problems of storage, access, indexing, delivery, scaling, privacy, interface, all of these are active fields of research and innovation. In fact, it is specifically Google's innovations in some of these areas (especially scaling at low cost) that make them attractive at all, so "done, cooked, finished" is extremely inaccurate. And that doesn't even get into the auxiliary issues: hardware, network design, algorithms for load balancing and systems monitoring, OS design and configuration, and security.

Zero dollars is not the same as free.

Don't be silly with all your talk of ONE institution with too much power and an overly centralized failure point of both service and security. There are TWO such institutions, you're forgetting Facebook as they control, own, and mine the other half of Internet communications.

It's not about being forced to use a specific email account. It is about handing the entire store of all academic, personal, and often confidential-by-law communications to a for-profit corporation whose business is data mining. We should be moving away from giving ownership of all our data to others, and universities should be at the head of that charge, not pushing people in the opposite direction. They should be seeking to protect the identities and private information of faculty, staff, and enrolled students, as well as sometimes sensitive and unpublished research data, as much as possible, not handing it over to third parties whose interests conflict with that goal. Where do Google's interests lie? Where do they stand to gain? From lowering the levels of information security and privacy and protection, not increasing it. This is at odds with what universities should be attempting to accomplish. Do, and should, your communications with the disciplinary board or billing office or your grades, or university medical center test results, or your personal communications about all the stupid stuff you do while a college student rightfully belong to an advertising company?

The problems here are several:

1) Email and file services, for a research university with a computer science program, is a core function.

2) Data and communications storage, retention, and management, for a research university doing anything at all, is a core function.

3) The assumption that outsourcing non-core functionality is always and automatically the answer to inefficiency is a mistaken premise. There is nothing inherent in outside providers that makes them capable of greater efficiency. Especially when you house an entire department researching the best solutions to problems related to the concern at hand.

First, no, it is not completely irrelevant at all, because, for one thing, people assume a lot of things about people based on their parties, things which are not necessarily so. Plenty of people's party loyalties were developed before their parties flipped all over the place on their stances. As the post I was replying to astutely pointed out, the modern parties in the U.S. are better described as shifting coalitions than as consistent interest groups. I think it is extremely relevant to the current political landscape that people realize how inconsistent and short-lived the meanings of "Republican" and "Democrat" are, because one of the huge problems right now in the United States is blind party loyalty, along with unwillingness to hear or believe anything good about people who wear the other party's badge.

Second, "liberal" has its own problems with shifting meaning, but I do regularly remind people that the Republicans, even more recently, when their hero Ronald Reagan was President, believed that torture was something done by evil, communist regimes like the USSR, and that their beloved America was, back then, in their eyes heroic because it wasn't like those awful countries on the other side of the iron curtain with their secret prisons and indefinite detention of tortured prisoners. (And that they were right back then, and shouldn't have changed their mind about keeping the moral high ground just because an infinitely weaker enemy than the Soviet Union ever was has now taken center stage.)

Well said, though I'd add the caveat that the broad southern affinity for the Republican Party is a more recent development. The South was more Democratic until only recently. The Dixiecrats were a major force in their party's, and the nation's politics not very long ago, and that stems all the way back to opposition to Lincoln's party. So the Southern attempts to block civil rights advancements were mostly coming from the Democratic Party (which is a fact that most people under 30 seem completely unaware of). So the internal inconsistency of the two parties that you mention is actually surprisingly strong.

When I was a kid, I kind of liked stations that did anounncer-read commercials, because they were less annoying than other commercials. It wasn't until I became an adult that it even occurred to me that this was a failure of integrity. I'm glad I'm not the only person who has noticed there is a problem with that model.

I have been hoping for this outcome, but there is a lot of reason to believe it is unlikely. One reason is that, when it comes to mass social media-developed stories, the brokers are everyone, and honest news sources can be overwhelmed and lost in the noise. To prevent this, every person has to regard him- or herself as a journalist with an obligation to check things before posting them, tweeting them, or otherwise passing them along. Given how well this has worked with all of the incredibly unbelievable urban legends that continue to be propagated via email despite easy fact checking, I have a feeling a lot more people find it easier to click "share" than to take time to look something up carefully.

The other reason I worry about this is that reputations themselves hold value and therefore are regularly sold off just like any other assets. How many companies are there that have developed a reputation for high quality, over many years, and then someone realized that if they put the same brand name on a lesser product, they could sell more of it at lesser cost. Sure, it diminishes the brand, but that takes time, and the profits are immediate. Furthermore, our culture (at least in the U.S.) has gradually devalued actual honesty (the foundation of a reputation) in favor of branding (the imagery of a reputation). Most troubling, personal honesty itself is not considered important. What is a paid endorsement, really? It is putting up your reputation for sale. Yet this is accepted without question as the best way to cash in on one's status as a trusted person. To see this in action out in the masses, how many bloggers, after building up a following, begin accepting "sponsored posts"? Vast numbers of them, and many have probably never even realized there is a moral dimension to this at all, it's just a way to earn money. If they have thought about it, they probably have never taken it seriously enough to actually refuse to do it, because looking at it as a form of dishonesty would be a "fringe" view in our present culture, and therefore easily dismissed regardless of its accuracy. So what I worry about is that, unless we somehow foster an actual cultural change, we'll wind up with just a continued bombardment of unchecked "facts" mixed with an endless succession of people and institutions that build up a trusted reputation and then cash out.