Depending on Internet Giants
Depending on Internet, hardware, and software companies is a mistake
Depending on Internet companies is a mistake. You are impacted as they drop product support, are purchased by other companies, and have security breaches and system failures of their own.
I have several examples that have occurred recently that highlight this.
- Tesla – Customers were locked out of their cars as the phone Key application experienced a outage. Smartphone apps go down all the time, but rarely do they affect your ability to drive your car.
- Google – Supported Haiku ceiling fans with the Nest thermostat device via the “Works with Nest” program. Google decided to end the program and go with the “Google Net” to support its own hardware business.
- Comcast email – Many users who had comcast.net email accounts were never made aware of the limitation of services with Comcast's recent spam protection process. What occurres is as an email is sent to a comcast user, if the email has multiple recipients, the email is placed on hold based on the comcast user’s usage. The user is NOT notified that the email was held. It is up to the sender to contact the user and re-send it with the email going to a single recipient.
- Eyefi WiFi – The company had a card that could be used on hi-end camera to transfer the images on a WiFi network to an iPad for example. Then with an application the images were transferred to the cloud. They made the $200 a brick when they sold their service. Not only could you not transfer the images via WiFi to an iPad, but also there was no way to access the images stored on the card. They used a proprietary file method that was not accessible by a Windows or Mac desktop.
- Apple backup – Apple iPads and iPhones are all geared towards using the Apple cloud. For example if you have multiple devices that are apple products, take photos, and sync you need to use the iCloud. In very short order you run out of our free allocation and need to pay for additional storage on a monthly basis.
- Microsoft Office and Adobe cloud – Just like Apple, they give you a bare minimum of cloud storage but must pay for overages with a monthly subscription.
There are many more examples. However, the point that I am making is vendors have their own self interests as prime objectives. The less that you depend on them for proprietary offerings, the more you can be assured that you can continue to operate when they change their corporate strategy.
How long will it be before a company like Goggle decides to charge for their free email services. Wait a minute, they already do with their offering G Suite.
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