Question: Can we trust Google with our data?
It's not just Gmail, but Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and even more data in Google's cloud. Can individuals and even corporations trust Google with their information?
I know they have the whole "don't be evil" thing going on, but isn't "evil" in the eye of the beholder.
On the other hand, is Google technically competent enough to keep the data from being damaged or destroyed? And on the other, other hand, maybe Google (or Amazon, IBM or what have you) is way, way better-equipped to be in charge of your data than you are.
The big question: Will Google roll over on you when the goverment comes a-callin'. I don't know what Google's record is on this, and the whole thing is a legal quagmire in the making.
From a purely technical standpoint, it might be a good idea to keep local backups, even if all your data is in Google, Amazon/Red Hat, IBM or whoever's cloud.
But considering how poor most of us (myself included) are at making and keeping backups, cloud computing and data storage is probably a pretty good idea.
But I throw it to you: Do you trust Google?
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Yes. They aren't getting any information I don't type into their website.
What are they going to do with this data? When "the goverment comes a-callin'" they can just as easily get the same data from your local machine if you do something to merit them doing so.
I really don't see what Google, or any big company is going to do with the data. The worst I can think of is selling all the email addresses to spammers, but a big company doing that without permission of their users would get sued instantly and such.
Besides, you don't have to sign up for a Google account. There are plenty of services to remove that cookie Google Search sets (Although I though the hysteria about cookies had died down), and I don't consider it all that much of a privacy problem.
The problem I do have with all this is speed, and reliability. A web-browser based word-processor is never going to be as responsive as a native desktop application, ever. A harddrive can write a file with very low latency, at very high speeds. Saving a document in a web-browser is going to take at least a few seconds, and is subject to session timeouts and other fun problems.
But my biggest problem is that Javascript and HTML really isn't designed to make spreadsheet applications.
They are inefficient (I imported a ~50 line CSV file into Google Spreadsheet, and tried to make a graph of it. About 30 seconds of 100% CPU usage it eventually produced a graph. Doing the same thing in a native application would have taken less than a second), and glitchy (Dragging selections sometimes reverts back to the "browser way", rather than the javascript-enhanced select-rows-or-columns stuff - Edit>Select All sometimes selects all columns, or all HTML)
They *are* convenient for quick documents, and if you want to work in two different places with an internet connection.
Personally I'd rather have the documents as files on a drive, where I can use any text editor on any machine (regardless of internet connection)
It's nothing to do with not-trusting-Google, but rather not trusting my internet connection. Yeh, it'll be up most of the time, but if the files are stored locally, it's a non-issue.
I did use Writely (which Google aquired) once or twice for it's collaborative editing thing, although we eventually ended up using Gobby as it showed other peoples edits in real time.