Grinchy Google to shut down another batch of services As part of its ongoing process of pruning and streamlining its engineering efforts, Google has decided to terminate yet another batch of unloved and little-used services, in what it's calling its "winter cleaning." Citing a need to "focus on creating beautiful, useful products that improve millions of people's lives every day …
...not only requires licences fees but also eternal vigilance. You have to keep up to date with whatever the new direction Microsoft are going in and watch out for unannounced 'fixes' that break stuff for everybody else but Microsoft.
Who would bother if they didn't have to?
I warned people about free "cloud" apps and how they could go away at any time. But most would not listen. No, I was old-fashioned because I didn't embrace a model where some company that owed me nothing controlled access to my data and applications, where an Internet outage could leave me unable to access critical data.
So, just to be clear, relying on free cloud computing services, apps, and storage for anything important to you is stupid.
Note: This is not an invitation to debate this topic with me. I'm posting to educate people, not argue with those who lack the knowledge, experience, or reasoning skills to recognize that what I said is completely correct.
They haven't really taken it away I don't think? I'm sure Microsoft can implement these open standards if they want to (Into their phones) along with Active Sync. Personally if I relied on Gmail I would just move to Outlook.com
I agree with you though and that's why I at least pay for Office 365, with all my emails pulled down to Outlook and backed up. Yes they could still get rid of the service, but it's less likely and a good balance between having the convenience of a cloud service and no hassle of running my own email server.
I think there was an article on here ages ago about not signing up to Cloud services if it doesn't give you a way to take regular backups of your data (Unless you don't care about said data). Even a paid for service could disappear over night.
danieltharris: "Even a paid for service could disappear over night."
Agreed, but at least if the company was still in business, you would have some legal recourse. When you've paid nothing to Google, you're hard-pressed to make a legal case that they breached a contract.
I began the migration of my mail from Gmail to ISP hosted email about a year ago. I know the effort threshold is quite high for those with cell phones, but the payoff is great. I rid myself of an out of date contact list, and the "changing my email" announcement mail I sent reaped the benefit of identifying who actually cares to communicate with me. All my pointless mailing lists, gone.
Kudos to Gmail on the spam controls.
I left gmail because of my concern over privacy, especially the Google+ mandatory public profile. All of my devices communicate with my mail server securely, via IMAP.
I had a follow on project with consolidating and controlling securely all my various passwords, increasing complexity of the passwords (per each sites differing requirement). I still suffer from PTSD.
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