Is this how you view Google and their continued expansion to take over our world of information?
What view do you hold?
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RevRod says
I remember the days when IBM was king before the pesky microcomputer threatened the ivory tower. Then came “little blue” bundling DOS with Lotus 1-2-3 while visions of macintosh apples came nipping at market share. Google may very well be the next king but the question is, “Do we need a king?” Imagine the fortunes of ancient Israel had they chosen not to seek out Saul.
Ted Carnahan says
Google probably isn’t so bad, but I’ve still sought out some ways to back up my Google hosted data – offlineimap is a great IMAP syncing tool that uses Maildir, and it’s pretty simple to download OPML files and such to back up the essentials in Google Reader. There’s still a lot tucked away in Google Land that I don’t have a backup plan for, though, and I shudder to think what I would do without it.
On the privacy end of things: I’m not that interesting. If I ever get that interesting, I’ll pay someone lots of money to sign a NDA and run a bunch of servers in-house. So, basically, never. 🙂
BenJPickett says
Google, a monster? As long as they don’t start buying their competitors, picking fights with smaller and newer competition that my peek around a corner, suing another because they decide Google is on to something good and imitate/copy that (the greatest form of flattery is plagiarism), or start stifling creativity and competition. I say no.
I think the best thing about Google is that they fuel innovation in this market place, they’ve made a business plan work that so many others couldn’t, and they have created a culture that embraces new ideas. And as long as other companies challenge their offerings and Google uses it as an opportunity to grow rather than whine and start fighting amongst themselves, they’ve got Gold.
As far as privacy and data security with Google goes, they never delete anything. I think my stuff is safe with them (I also have stuff stored on Microsoft servers) but I still have other backups and with Google’s current level of ethics to their users, I don’t think we have anything to worry about at this time.