People

I was making dinner tonight, getting down with a vegetable peeler and some thumping Techno (not necessarily a good combination) when - silence. Deep Mix Moscow Radio apparently forgot about Glasnost and my dance needs and went back behind the curtain, taking their internet stream with them. Reminding me yet again why it's a really dumb idea to depend on the Internet to deliver anything, consistently. I scouted the list of Techno internet radio stations and most were "not available now." I'm happy to report that I finally found a consistent stream (FG Underground, if you're interested) and dinner got taken care of, but like I said, foolish me, getting caught out on a cold night with no tunes.

Loss of streaming Techno while making dinner might not seem like a big deal, and it's not. But loss of access to my business content at a critical point of my day is simply a non-starter.

Maybe I still have some residual resentment at having had to do an in-depth analysis of Google Apps over the last few days, when a sane, objective glance at the concept is enough to convince me - DUMB IDEA! I love Google, I love to type in search words and have all sorts of surprising results come back. But there's no way I'm going to trust them to format, store, manage and deliver my business content. It's like trusting the US Postal Service to bring me my coffee in the morning - thanks, but that's way too important a task to mess around with. It's like trusting SuperCuts to give me a killer haircut right before that big date. It's like handing my bags to the official-looking woman at the airport in Bangkok and trusting she'll have them delivered to my hotel for me. Dumb Dumb Dumb.

And it's unnecessary. There are solutions already out there that millions of people use every day. Those solutions are not perfect by any means, but we believe our software will make a big improvement in the process. We do NOT think the right answer is "Start from scratch and change everything." I have a word for that approach and it begins with "D," which may not surprise you. People don't like change. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." "If it's slightly broke and you expect me to change my ways to help fix it, then don't fix it." In almost every process that relies on people, change comes slowly, if at all.

We know that things can change, and change quickly. Work practices and attitudes can be radically altered by disruptive technologies such as the internet. But Google Apps isn't one of those disruptive technologies (unless I'm speaking personally, in which case it's definitely disrupted my week). Maybe in a few years, if Google brings the quality of the tools up to the then-current standard of Microsoft Office. Maybe if they somehow can guarantee uptime and accessibility under all circumstances. And most importantly, if they can deliver something extra on top that makes the whole deal so much better, faster, easier and cheaper than the alternatives. THEN, maybe, they'll get professionals to abandon their old tools and processes.

But we're not hanging our hat on that happening in the immediate future. Meanwhile we see a critical need TODAY to improve the way people collaborate on and share information that already exists on their hard disks or enterprise servers. Content they're creating using desktop applications, not Google Apps. Our goal is to solve this Here & Now problem with some smart applications that work with your Here & Now computing environment. Oh, and our apps are really handy for accessing your music files too...