Open Letter To “The Goog”
Dear Giant Goog,
You know, it’s not often that a company can
reach towards world domination, and do so with a ‘Don’t be evil’
atitude all at once. But you, oh great giver of information, have
succeeded. Ok, so maybe not WORLD domination, but at least you’ve
managed to dominate my digital lifestyle.
Please click on to read the whole letter….
It all started with that oh so simple
flashing-cursor-in-a-text-box of a search engine, that great window to
anything from pron to politics. You got me hooked on the simplicity of
it all: need to know where Pete’s Pizza is located? Google it up.
Need to know what the average carrying capacity of an African Swallow
is? Hit up the Goog. Need to know if there are any 24-hour bowling
alley’s in a 5 mile radius of my house? Google-fu will tell me. Yes,
you hooked us all in with your search.
But you weren’t content to stop there! Next came Gmail, and
that oh so tantalizing ‘Archive’ button. Folders? Bah, who needs
‘em! Labels, now that’s where it’s at. Delete? Why bother? You
never know when someday, I might need that email from John’s Viagra
supply, so I simply archive it away! You’ve turned me into an email
pack-rat, and I love it! OH, and while you were at it, you let me IM
from right within my Gmail window, and I’ve been steady Gtalkin’ ever
since!
Next came the calendar. All of a sudden, my life was
organized, and that organization was accessible from anywhere! Need to
know when that dentist appointment is? It’s on the Goog. Need to know
when I’m supposed to take my cat to the vet? The great Googley Monster
can tell me!
Finally, you did something which I’ll forever be grateful for:
you took my office online, and I’m not looking back! All of a sudden,
those word documents are not tied to a specific computer anymore, and
spreadsheets seem to float in the internet ether, waiting to be
updated!
Through all of this mobile bliss, however, there’s been one
dark side: my phone, that ever present smart device glued to the palm
of my hand, was forever shutout from the digital revolution you
offered. Oh, sure, I could access my Gmail, but how well? Yeah, there
were some options for my Gtalkin’ addiction, but they soon went the way
of the dollar, forever denied to my poor broke ass. And the Goog
calendar? Sadly, it couldn’t talk to me over the cellphone ether
cloud, so my organizational ability suffers.
But you could fix this for me! All you would need to do is
have some of those brilliant Goog Legion Coders to write up a mobile
suite! That evil Yahooligan Yodeler already has… and we can’t let
them win, right?
I imagine a day when my Nokia Smart phone would automagically
sync it’s internal calendar with that great Goog organizer! I dream of
waking up to my Gmail, sitting on my phone waiting! I wonder how much
more productive I could be, if my Gtalkin’ habit was extended to
everywhere I went? And just THINK of the saved sanity of knowing my
mobile office documents were waiting for me in the GoogleDocs, ready to
be printed or edited at will.
Only you, Great Giant Goog, have the ability to save me from
my mobile disconnect. I want to leave you with the following scenario,
and how think of how Google-fied it will be:
I wake up in the
morning, only to find that I’ve been Gmailed a request to meet someone
at a coffee-house around 11:00. I check my calendar, see that I’ve
already got an appointment scheduled, so I fire back a reply asking for
11:30 instead. The other party accepts, and my Google Calendar is
updated with the new time, directly out of my email. I check the
further messages, and find that my brother-in-law is wondering when we
can get together for some drinks. I see that he’s online, through the
icon in my email box, so I send him a quick Gtalk Message to finalize
the details. A few quick messages later, and we are all ready to meet
at the bar for dinner and a beer… I click on the ’save to calendar’
pop-up within Gtalk, and it’s scheduled out. I’m getting ready to
leave for my first appointment of the day, when I realize that the
proposal for that customer hasn’t been emailed out to them yet, and I
don’t have a copy at home I can send! No worries, I shoot an email too
them, proposal attached from GoogleDocs, and I’m out the door.
All the while, my laptop sits cold and quiet, having never
been fired up, thinking digital thoughts of murder towards a certain
Nokia Smartphone with it’s GoogleMobile Suite.
Thanks for all the great work Goog, let’s continue the trend to the mobile, shall we?
-olly
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