Google Ain’t All That

I’ve been fol­low­ing var­i­ous forum and blog posts regard­ing the Apple MobileMe announce­ment; and I see a trend that’s begin­ning to annoy me. Inevitably, at some point some­one will make a com­ment along the lines of, “I don’t see why any­one would bother with this when there’s Google Mail, Calendar, etc.”  Without going into an analy­sis of the MobileMe ser­vice itself (hard to do when it doesn’t exist yet), I am con­stantly annoyed by this sort of short-sighted think­ing.  Heaven for­bid that Apple, or any­one for that mat­ter, dare to attempt to com­pete with the mighty Google.

I hate to break it to the Googletards, but there is more to the inter­net and com­put­ing that Google.  Some of us have com­pelling rea­sons for want­ing a com­pet­ing ser­vice.  Here’s just a sin­gle one that is a fac­tor for me. Seamless desk­top and remote inte­gra­tion.  I’ve been dying for a seam­less way to inte­grate my desk­top work­flow (iCal, Mail, iLife) with both the web, and with the Windows machines that I have to use at work.  And, before I get a slew of com­ments point­ing out how to inte­grate with Google’s ser­vices, I know about them; I even am cur­rently using some such as BusySync.  But, in the end, they are, to a greater or lesser extent, kludges.  I want some­thing that, in the words of my dark lord Steve Jobs, “just works.”

But that’s the won­der­ful thing.  If Google is work­ing for you, by all means stay there.  That’s the beauty of it. Competing ser­vices that co-exist using open and inter­op­er­a­ble stan­dards.  It’s a win for every­one.  Well, every­one but Microsoft.