Sunday, September 25, 2011

Moving away from Google

Recent and not-so-recent posts by a number of bloggers (e.g. 1, 2; just 2 of the 6 or 8 I've read in the past few days) regarding getting locked out of their Google accounts have reminded me why personal computers boomed in the workplace so quickly.

In the early days, PCs (well, except for Macs) were hard to use, had horrible interfaces, minimal software choices (WordStar, VisiCalc, dBase II, and AutoCAD were the exceptions), and were in huge demand everywhere. Why? I think it was largely because they allowed us to control our work. We had word processing, databases, and CAD systems before PCs. They were controlled by others--we could be locked out, inconvenienced, our work confiscated and our access revoked by those in control, without appeal and without warning.

Sound familiar?