It’s times like this that I’m brought to consider the implications of relying too much on one company.
I awoke this morning to discover that Gmail wasn’t working for me. A quick perusal of recent Twitter updates from my contacts confirmed it wasn’t just me. It would seem that Gmail is having trouble again and many people aren’t able to access their messages.
Personally speaking this doesn’t have a critical impact on me – I have other accounts I can use to send and receive email, as well as send information out via Twitter updates or private messages, or even write blog posts – but I was nonetheless brought to consider the fact that most of the programs I rely upon most heavily are all run by Google.
That said, I’m not one of those people who feels that by using Google software I’m revealing too much about myself and putting myself at risk. Honestly with the sheer monolithic power of their search engines you don’t need to be a Google user to be discovered by their indexing processes. Granted, for those who fear Google this statement isn’t much more of a comfort. If you fear Google’s quasi-omnipotent knowledge about our online habits, then any online activity undertaken by Google is likely to be met with serious reservation and concern.
Really the only defense against companies learning too much about us online is to not share the information online in the first place.
No, my concern today is purely a pragmatic, practical one. I use Gmail for email; Google Reader for RSS aggregation; Google Docs for online spreadsheets, presentations and word processing; YouTube for video hosting and streaming; and to a much lesser degree Google Calendar for event planning and Google Groups for discussion and other collaborative activities.
From my meager recollections of the business courses I took at uni (can you believe it, I majored in Economics?) diversity in your portfolio is a very wise activity, and investing or storing too many of your assets in only a few companies can put you at risk of substantial losses in the event of a downturn in the market, or problems with the companies themselves.
The fact Google services interoperate so well with one another make the company’s software very appealing, and there is clear motivation to look to them as the first port of call when you need to engage online. But as this newest trouble with Gmail highlights, there are serious implications of failing to diversify in your online software portfolio – or at the very least having fail-over processes and substitutes in place.
I prefer an engineering or systems metaphor to the financial one. Think in terms of building in redundancy: for every app, two alternatives that do more or less the same job. Have Picasa and Twitpic accounts as well as Flickr etc. The Google integration is great, but you have to have something else up your sleeve.
Agreed, that's one of the reasons why I have such an aversion to the phrases Human Resources or Human Capital. People are far more than more than inputs for production.