Hooked on Google

I was just forwarded an interesting blog post written by Abhijeet Mukherjee, of Jeet Blog:

10 Useful Apps to Reduce Your Dependency on Google Products.

Go ahead, read it. Read the comments too...

After reading through the comments, here are some of my thoughts about it.

I think that to have all of the killer apps is not the be all end all, in fact, I think that it eventually implodes on itself. There is no such thing as an unbeatable killer app either. The innovation and competition out there makes that impossible. Just look at Microsoft's Office Suite, and how there are open-source applications that are targeting that market share.

No one vendor has all of the killer apps, nor should they.

I think that interop is key to the cloud. While you may have stuff stored in one place, or even in multiple, I would prefer to have multiple tools, best of breed from whichever vendor, or whatever I find that fits how I work, to access that data.

It is impossible to have one vendor to rule them all, and in my opinion, would not be a place I would want my business. I thought the post about Google taking over the world was funny, because I truly think it is impossible to do. Would you not think that is a form of benevolent dictatorship? Our regulatory organizations globally frown upon that business practice. Microsoft is definitely a case in point.

Remember, people are fickle, and opinions change on a dime.

There were a lot of differing opinions out there that went from loving the ability to access their applications/data from anywhere to those who liked the mix of having desktop applications to reach into the cloud. This is one of the tenets of Microsoft's vision of Software + Services (S+S), having that flexibility of putting everything online at one end of the spectrum, to having rich client applications reaching into the cloud at the other.

Just my opinions on the opinions!