A googol is a mathematical word used for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. With that said, the term Google was formed as a play on that word and in making the story short, the name Google was created for the company you now know, love, or loath today.
Why this history lesson in corporate names? Well, it’s because Google seems to be doing just what the inspirational word for their name states, they’ve developed just about a googol of software….and I’m starting to heavily use them.
I’ve always been the type to use as little web hosted software as possible when I could write something myself, host something myself, or support something myself. I used to post pictures on Yahoo! photos. Well, after I lost all my Italy photos and comments when Yahoo! photos went under and moved to Flickr, I became quite upset. I didn’t lose the actual photos, but it was all the comments that I made with real-time thoughts and feelings about what was in the pictures, that I lost. Since this loss, I’ve been hosting my own photos on my own web server. The same became true with e-mail, I started using an email client to download email to a computer so that if a web-mail host went down or out of business, I didn’t lose anything.
Well, the paranoia seems to have left me (or just been easing). I’ve finally gone back to web-mail w/ Gmail, along with using Google’s Calendar, and as of today, I’m starting to look at Google Reader for my RSS feeds. My rationale is the integration w/ Google products and my iPhone. Therefore, I always have all my email from any computer in the world or through my iPhone, and it’s all synced together. No more email on just 1 computer or just on my phone. Google’s a large company, I don’t see them going out of business any time soon, so if I did need to export my email do to a going out of business sale, I imagine I’d have time to forward emails elsewhere.
You hear about those people out there, they only use Microsoft products; only Windows and only hotmail, and now only Bing. Then there are the Apple folks, OSX for life! Ohh, and you can’t forget, the world’s best, the Linux group, they know better than all, and they don’t pay a dime for any software! Now, it seems like I’m somewhere in between. I’m heavily invested w/ Google now. I have multiple Gmail powered email accounts; therefore, calendars as well. What happens if Gmail goes down for an extended period, much worse than last weeks outage? I guess that’s the risk I run. Or maybe it’s just an over-paranoid fear a techie like myself just has, but that’s why I run 2 computers w/ 3 different OSes (2 Windows versions & Ubuntu Linux), 3 different calendars (synced up of course), and an old email account on a mail client as a backup along with the web-mail accounts as my primary email?
Anyways, I find it safe to say, a googol of applications has been good to me so far, let’s hope I don’t face a googol of problems in the future due to it!
