“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote in a blog post Friday.

The announcement comes more than two weeks after Google reported that its servers had been the target of attacks originating in China. Those attacks targeted a vulnerability in IE 6, for which Microsoft has since issued a fix.

Support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites will end March 1, Sheth said in the post. At that point, IE6 users who try to access Docs or Sites may find that “key functionality” won’t work properly, he said.

Sheth suggested that customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 or Safari 3.0, or more recent versions of those browsers.

According to StatCounter, IE6 has 18 percent market share among browsers.

The Chinese Writers Association posted a copy of the Google statement on its Web site on Sunday. On the same day Erik Hartmann, an Asia-Pacific representative of Google Books, delivered the apology in a news program aired by China’s state broadcaster.

China is one of several countries, including the U.S. and France, where Google’s digital library program has faced legal challenges. The apology comes after the Chinese group demanded that Google compensate local authors whose works the U.S. search giant scanned without their approval.

Google is scanning hundreds of thousands of books, often without prior permission from their rights holders, so they can be searched and previewed on the Google Books service.

Google acknowledged in the statement that it had scanned books by Chinese writers and said the company would no longer do so without local authors’ permission. It also said it hopes to reach a general agreement over resolving the tensions by March and to sign a final agreement in the second quarter.

“Due to different starting notions and different understandings of the copyright law systems in China and the U.S., our behavior has caused discontent among Chinese writers,” the statement said. “Our communication with Chinese authors has not been good enough. Google is willing to apologize to Chinese authors for this behavior.”

Google has held talks with a local copyright protection group over the book service. One Chinese author, Shanghai-based Mian Mian, has brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google for scanning her novel Acid Lover and showing portions of it online.

A Google spokeswoman said Google Books complies with U.S. and Chinese law and that the company only shows snippets of copyright books for which it does not have permission from rights holders. Authors and publishers can choose to exclude their works from the service, she said.

The cloud is all the rage. Vendors of all shapes and sizes are in a race to move as many products and services as possible to the cloud – providing managed services and software-as-a-service rather than traditional, locally-installed, software applications.

There are many major players investing in moving customers to the cloud. Amazon has a cloud computing offering and recently bolstered it with a more secure, segregated private cloud service. Microsoft provides hosted online productivity services and recently rolled out the technical preview of Office Web Apps, delivering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote from the cloud.

Google is arguably the primary champion of cloud computing. The Web is what Google does. Google has a virtually endless list of products and services that are all delivered via the Web from the cloud.

Google is not content with dominating Web search or search engine advertising. It has an ongoing crusade to deliver business productivity from the Web. Google is taking on Microsoft head-to-head across a range of markets in an effort to wrest control from the desktop and move the computing experience to the Web.

That crusade has had relative success. Many users and businesses have found that Google Docs can fill their office productivity needs. Gmail can fulfill their e-mail needs. Google Calendar provides scheduling. Google Talk delivers instant messaging. Basically, Google has enough tools and services to fulfill virtually all of the productivity and communications needs for an organization…from the Web.

The problem is that Google has experienced repeated issues with service outages. Here are just a few of the headline-making outages:

· September 24, 2009: Gmail outage

· September 22, 2009: Google News outage

· September 1, 2009: Gmail outage

· May 14, 2009: Google network outage

· May 18, 2009: Google News outage

· March 9, 2009: Gmail outage

· August 7, 2008: Gmail and Google Apps outage

These repeated outages damage the credibility of the cloud. Enterprises that are considering the pros and cons of moving office productivity or communications to the cloud have reason to be concerned when the poster child of cloud computing can’t provide reliable availability.

The cloud offers many potential advantages for customers, but one of the biggest factors driving apprehension and impeding adoption is availability. Customers are reluctant to offload productivity and communication to the cloud if the possibility exists for the cloud to disappear. Productivity and communication are mission-critical aspects for businesses and reliable availability is not negotiable.

David Coursey summed it up nicely, stating “Rather than adding features that add only questionable value to our lives, such as Sidewiki and Fast Flip news, maybe Google needs to stop, take a deep breath, and focus on quality and reliability for products many of us use every day? ”

Google can help improve the reputation of the cloud and further its own agenda to make desktop applications obsolete and move everything to the Web by ensuring that the products and services it provides are as reliable as they are functional.

On the subject of Twitter, the company announced some changes to its terms of service late last week. They tried to emphasize that users “own their tweets.” But do users really own them if they cannot access them because Twitter is not working? What if you could export your Tweets into Facebook, or into MySpace? It’s not that one service is better than the other. It’s about simply having the freedom to take your data wherever you want.

Google realizes the importance of this concept, which is why some members of the company’s team have gotten together and formed the Data Liberation Front, a group that is dedicated to making Google’s products easier to get data in and out of. The group has also launched a website at DataLiberation.org, where users of Google products can find information about how to import and export data.

“Many web services make it difficult to leave their services – you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops — for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once,” says Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager. “We believe that users – not products – own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We’d rather have loyal users who use Google products because they’re innovative – not because they lock users in.”

The group’s mission statement goes:

Users own the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to give users greater control by making it easier for them to move data in and out.

“This principle not only applies to individual users, but also to businesses, schools and other organizations that choose Google Apps to provide better tools at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions,” says Fitzpatrick. “It should be easy to bring legacy data into the cloud, share data between Google Apps and other IT infrastructure, and get data out of the cloud if it ever makes sense to stop using our service.“

At DataLiberation.org, users can simply browse through Google’s list of products and see detailed instructions for each one about how to “escape” to or from any of them. This list includes: AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, App Engine, Apps for Businesses, Blogger, Bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome Boomarks, Contacts, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, Maps, Notebook, Orkut, Picasa, Reader, Voice, Web History, and YouTube.

The company says it will be working on adding import/export features to more of its products like Google Sites, and Google Docs (batch-export) in the coming months.

“We think open is better than closed — not because closed is inherently bad, but because when it’s easy for users to leave your product, there’s a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users,” says Fitzpatrick. “When your users are locked in, there’s a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.”

Google’s certainly not the only company to offer data portability options, but it’s a very large one that has a huge impact on a lot of users and businesses. That’s why Google’s work in this area is so important. The company’s broad range of products that are used heavily on a daily basis emphasizes the importance of the issue on the web in general. Tired of Gmail going down? You can take your info elsewhere if you wish.

“Google Checkout sellers of real estate rentals, timeshares, and day sight-seeing tours must have a valid public business URL,” says Sammer Abdul of Google Checkout Operations. “The sellers may, however, choose to use either Checkout buttons or Checkout invoices to process transactions for the above allowable services based on their business requirements.”

The Google Checkout merchant help center provides a list of product categories (as well as examples), which are still considered unacceptable. Some of these are obvious (illegal goods), and some not so obvious (Travel packages and offers).
The competition is heating up among payment services, with Facebook now widely considered a potential big-player, and possibly Apple too. By not offering real estate rentals, timeshares, etc. Google is missing out on a fair amount of business. This is likely the driving factor behind Google’s decision to allow these.
On a semi-related note, Google recently announced it has made it easier to link Google Checkout with Google Base accounts. There’s a new page in the “settings” tab called “Checkout,” where you can add accounts to Checkout by entering a Checkout Merchant ID.

With the arrival of the Bing search engine and the Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership, it’s been a hectic summer for search — not that you’ll see market leader Google sweating.

With a united front building against its cash cow search business, Google is playing it cool.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said back in June about Bing: “I don’t think Bing’s arrival has changed what we’re doing. We are about search, we’re about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation.” For the most part Google is ignoring Bing, at least publicly. Google has not made any outward strategic moves that imply worry about Bing or the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership, other than to state that it’s bad for innovation and competition.

Indeed, the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership will face the scrutiny of antitrust regulators and some experts question whether the partnership will be approved.

But if the partnership does pass legal muster, the search wizards in Mountain View will have a legitimate threat on deck. Microsoft has the money ($100 million is being spent on Bing marketing) and Yahoo has the users (98 million Yahoo Mail users in the United States, four times as many as Gmail). Both companies have the technology.

Google’s plan, according to an upcoming Time magazine feature story, is to keep on innovating in search and let Microsoft mass market the heck out of Bing. But here are three reasons why quietly innovating may not be enough to keep the tenacious Microhoo at bay.

Microsoft Has Deep Pockets and Dogged Commitment to Search

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made it clear that Microsoft’s foray into search is not a flirtation, it’s a marriage. He said at Bing’s launch in late May: “Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search.”

Microsoft has said that it plans to spend 5 to 10 percent of its operating income on search over the next five years, a number that works out to be roughly $10 billion per year.

From the outset, Microsoft pointed all its guns at Google with Bing, working to make its interface warm and colorful and structure its search results into categories, as opposed to Google’s minimalist interface and long list of links. The subsequent $100 million ad campaign for Bing has focused on how it is more organized and user-friendly than Google.

So far, Microsoft’s investment in Bing has paid off. In June and July, Bing’s market share increased nearly a full percentage point, from 8.0 percent to 8.9 percent.