My Transition to the Cloud

That's it. I've had it with maintaining my own mail, web, LDAP, DNS servers at home. I can't compete with Google. For the last 10 years or so, I took pride in telling anyone who cared that I didn't rely on any public email system. I ran my own sendmail server. I didn't trust my email in the hands of anybody else.

But over the summer, I started using Google Docs. I saw a world of possibilities open up before me. It dawned on me how powerful the ability to collaborate and share documents online was. I went on a trip to Italy this summer with 7 friends of mine. I setup a Google spreadsheet to help us coordinate information. I couldn't believe what I saw: "You're telling me that I can update this one spreadsheet cell and someone else will see the change immediately?" -- Yes. Awesomeness.

I was using Thunderbird as my email client. I liked it because it ran on Linux or Windows. Then, I saw that Thunderbird 3.0 introduced an email search that shows results in a similar fashion to Gmail. Then I thought: "Why am I using a system that is only now catching up to what Google has been doing for years?". The last hurdle in my mind was price. I thought I wouldn't want to use a system that would lock-me in and then gouge me. I checked my current mail spool file that contains about 7 years worth of email: 700M. Gmail gives me 8G for free. And as of today, I can get 20G of space for $5/year. Why am I even bothering?

I use Google Picasa, Reader, Maps. I signed up for Google Voice over the fall. So now, I'm transferring the last 2 services to Google: gmail and my blog.

Long live Google!