I have a friend, he’s a technology guy and fairly savvy with hardware and software. We were talking recently and he said that he didn’t see the point in performing backups or even buying software for his machine anymore. He runs Windows and *Nix in various places, but uses GMail for messaging, Google Apps and Docs to store things, Picassa and Flickr to store photos, and Yahoo’s Calendar service (he’s been with them for years) to manage things. He syncs to his phone, and I think he’s even trying out Google Voice as the phone number management issue. When they start offering hosted servers or VMs, he’ll be looking to host there as well.
I questioned him about backups and he said that Google just does a better job than he could do. They have redundant everything and they have more knowledge about how to better store things. He trusts Google to do the job for the foreseeable future.
I’m not sure I’m quite there. I have lots of stuff stored at Google: various blogs, my calendar, my contacts, I use google Voice, etc. I have pictures up on various places, and I do think that having the cloud store my data makes sense. It allows me to sync things across multiple machines, as well as my phone.
But I don’t completely trust Google. There have been issues with GMail, and recently with the Sidekick servers at Microsoft. I still think I need to keep copies of things on my machines, and as backups.
I’ll just say the various cloud services, especially Live Mesh, make it easy for me to keep multiple copies, giving me an instant backup in multiple places.
I tried out Bing’s new visual search after seeing a few people note it on Twitter. I was a little excited to try it, thinking that it might help me to find images for the editorials easier.
It didn’t, and I was disappointed. I thought that this short review in PC Week summed it up. It just doesn’t work well, and the best quote:
Yet after every search trial I always come back to Google, because it works.
I tried typing something in, but that brought me back to the regular search. I clicked “TV Shows”, looking for images from Leverage, but I couldn’t make out detail in the images. Too many to look through, and too slow. I found myself looking up at the search box for the words as I moused over
I’ve given Yahoo and Live chances, and each time they just don’t do a better job. So why should I switch? I haven’t used Bing a lot, but unless it improves on Google significantly, why should I switch?
I’d use a visual search if it made things easier. What I’d like in visual search is a combination of meta data and breadcrumbs to narrow things down. If I search for “flower”, then give me some options on the side like Amazon does. Let me pick from
Then let me click those to narrow down the images I want. I can scan images quickly if I’m trying to narrow things down or find some type of image.
If someone could make search for better, I’d try it, but so far Google does the job.
(cross posted to my dkranch blog)
After my editorial on portable data centers, I had a number of people knock down the idea, saying it doesn’t make sense for them. I concede that not everyone can take advantage of data centers at a container level, but I’d also note that I think not everyone should be running a data center. Most companies don’t have the expertise to do it well, any savings they get from less hosting fees is probably lost in the overhead of inefficient running of the centers.
Instead I think that many companies that have a container’s worth of servers, which could be some few hundred servers, might do better with a container and allowing companies to host containers of servers.
And if other companies can provide the entire structure, like SUN, then perhaps it can be cost effective. However, they can’t just provide their regular servers in a container.
Google posted some tours of it’s data centers on YouTube, and they were very interesting. The first one on this page shows some of the ways containers are implemented, but if you notice during the server replacement, these aren’t regular server that’s racked. Other vendors need to implement similar measures.
The other problem with containers, is a how you get there from here. Most companies grow over time, which means they start with a rack or 2, or 3, and by the time they have enough to fill a container, they might not want to make that investment. I’m not sure of what you would do here to solve this, but something should be done.
I really think that economies of scale will win out here, but it’s will take time, and the need for data centers to become more of a commodity, with better security and separation for customers without a big price premium.
Last night I was at the store with Delaney after karate and he mentioned that we needed to go pick up snowboards from the shop. I'd forgotten Thur afternoon to get them and wanted to remind myself to go Fri.
I had my TMobile G1 with me, but also my iTouch. I decided to enter the appointment there since I sometimes have that with me and nothing else. So I typed in an appointment on the iTouch. We got home and I plugged it into my desktop to sync it up. That's all I did.
This morning I woke up and checked for my appointment. It appeared:
5 places, 1 entry, one plug in to sync my iTouch.
Very cool!
One of Google's tenets is to "do no evil" as they run their corporation. This article questions their motives as they've changed the agreement for Chrome, their browser.
I don't necessarily think that Google is evil, and in many ways I think they've learned from Microsoft in how to not appear so. They're a corporation, striving for profit and trying to do a better job, but they're going to stumble. Naturally they want to promote their own products, which makes sense, and tie them tightly together.
That's what Microsoft wants as well, though they sometimes go too far in preventing alternatives from being adopted.
It's a fine line that you walk as a corporation, trying to grow, trying to make a profit, and it's hard sometimes to know if you're skirting the line and perhaps doing something unethical. In my ventures we've tried to be fair, but there are plenty of people that have disagreed with our decisions.
Personally I think this is where capitalism fails. As entities grow larger, become more popular, they gain power, and it's hard to not take advantage of that power to grow more. I think many times the most successful companies sometimes appear evil because they continue to do what has worked for them. And those practices often shut out or prevent smaller companies from competing, making them appear evil.
There's no shortage of evil companies, however, with plenty of people willing to make decisions and engage in practices they know are illegal or immoral, all to make a few more shekels.
Last week Steve Ballmer had issued a challenge to MVPs to have them try Live Search instead of their regular search engine if they weren’t using Live. Primarily I’ve used Google over the years, though I periodically have compared Live and Yahoo to Google to see how things work.
So why did I switch back?
The main one is that Live isn’t better than Google. When I used it last week, it worked, meaning I got work done and I could usually find a good result on the first page. That hasn’t always been the case, and it was good to see that happening.
As I was using it yesterday, trying to look up a couple businesses, I noticed something. Here’s a shot of Live when looking for a business:
And here is one from Google:
If you notice, Google and Live have the same results listed with the companies at the top, however Google gives me a little map to help me determine which one is most useful. If I click on the “directions” link, I get the more detailed map, the address, phone, link to the site, and directions links.
If I click on the Live link, I get similar information, but a much less detailed map, so I have to zoom to be sure that it’s the right one, though they have directions from major intersections available at 1-click. Arguably that’s better for some people, but for me I usually like confirming the address, and the Google map on the first page helps.
There are things that I see Live trying, like showing MapQuest as one of the links, but the overall impression is too much, irrelevant information on the page.
When searching for a few other things that I noticed as well. When I had to search last week for “sysdepends” one of the tables in SQL Server, the most relevant link returned on Google was for Books Online, which is what I was looking for. This link was on the first page of the Live results, but it was #6, and I had to scroll to see it.
The other thing is that Google caches results, so if a site is having issues, or want to see the HTML version of a PDF, I can get it with one click on Google. Live seems to have cached pages, but not for quite a few things I searched for.
Lastly, when I searched for “oracle performance on Hyper-V”, looking for a PDF that I saw, neither engine returned it though that was likely my poor choice of terms. However Live had a “Buy Hyper" link from e-bay, which is totally irrelevant. I think Microsoft took too much money from ebay to get links up there when they aren’t helping much of the time.
If they want to get me to switch, one thing they could do is give me a check box next to the search button that says “I’m not buying something” and let me search for things without getting too much retail crap in the way when I really just want to get some information.
Steve Ballmer issued a challenge to MVPs a couple weeks ago, asking them to switch to Live Search this week and give it a chance. So I did, moving the defaults on all my browsers (IE, Firefox, and Chrome) to Live this morning.
I've been critical of Live over the last few years, but I've given it a chance. A couple times a year someone will post that they're using it and for a couple days I'll run some double searches. I'll use Google, Yahoo, and Live and compare the results.
And Google usually wins. It returns what I consider more relevant searches.
Now I'm not a power searcher. I tend to use a few terms, and none of the quotes, !, ~, NOT, and other power searching expressions. If I don't get results on the first page, I might hit the second, but not much more. Using that technique, I used to never get the things I wanted on the first page from Live, but I did from Google or Yahoo. And Google is cleaner, less stuff, so I've tended to use it.
That being said, the last time I tried Live, this past summer, it was pretty close. For example, when I search for somethng like sp_change_users_login, I tend to want BOL to come up first. It always has on Google (first page at least) and on Yahoo, but on Live I often had lots of MSDN blogs and things and not the source for reference. That seemed to change earlier this year and Live was better.
I'm not sure how well this will work, but I'm willing to give it a try. I've been a Microsoft software user for most of my career and it just works. So I'll take the challenge and see if it impacts my work.
But I'm not likely to switch permantently. Not because I love Google, or dislike Live, but I think MS has a fairly large monopoly on lots of software. I like competition and I want to see alternatives. I buy books from Amazon and Barnes and Noble because I want both to succeed. I want both around for a long time, even if B&N becomes a place I can download books to my Kindle.
I think Google is as likely to make monopoly mistakes as MS, and so I want Live to continue to be used, but I don't want it to dominate like IE did for awhile. Maybe I'm overthinking this as we now have choices (Firefox and Chrome), but I like doing my part to balance thinges in the universe.
