Dick Pountain/Idealog 267/05 October 2016 11:05
Last month PC Pro ed Tim Danton asked us for masthead quotes on "Which technology brand have you recommended most over the years, and why?" My reply was "Google, since their cloudy goodness now serves most of my computing needs". At the time that felt like a rather dull answer, but ever since Google cluster-bombed the industry with new products on 5th October I feel pretty damned smug (and prepared to pretend I had inside knowledge).
That answer was based on the fact that Google has been handling my email, calendar and contacts in its cloud for many years now, thus permitting me to access them from any device and platform. More recently I've found that the ever-increasing capabilities of Google Keep let me use it for much of my data storage too. Don't be fooled by its Tonka Toy appearance, its combination of full-text search, colour coding and labelling makes it the most flexible text database I've found, plus it's multiplatform and its voice recognition is effective enough to enable dictation of notes. When shopping in Sainsbury's my grocery list is a Keep widget on my Android phone's home screen, and all the outlines and notes for this column go into Keep via my Lenovo Yoga laptop. I don't use Google Docs much myself, preferring Dropbox, but I often receive long documents that way from others I work with (including PC Pro).
Google could in theory let me realise the perennial dream of a single box that does everything, given a large enough phone (I refuse to use the ph**let word) or top-end Chromebook, but actually it's achieved the opposite. Since I can access my data from anywhere I use five different boxes: Lenovo Windows laptop, Asus Android tablet, HTC Android phone, Amazon Kindle 4 and a Sony WX350 compact camera (for me phones make lousy cameras, regardless of resolution). As for those other four boxes, it's all about screens. I use the tablet most, to read and answer email, run Citymapper when I need to plan a trip across London, but mostly for searching Wikipedia and Google while I'm reading. And my reading is done either in paper books or on Kindle - I deliberately keep a vintage, non-backlit, non-touchscreen version 4 because I prefer to read by natural light and only want pages to turn when I say so. Nowadays I tend to request review books in Kindle format so I can make notes and highlight quotes as I read, then cut-and-paste those from Windows Kindle Reader on my Yoga straight into Libre Office.
Since so much of my work and personal data now resides in Google's ecosystem, doesn't that dependency worry me? In some ways yes, but perhaps not ways you'd expect. I feel safer with Google than I would with Apple for all kinds of reasons: Apple has an even worse record than Google for high-handed treatment of its users, and I'm no devotee of its cult of shiny things. Both Amazon (via Kindle and Fire tablets) and Facebook would love to create ecosystems as rich as Google's, but they will be a long time coming and I don't trust either company that much. So the question for me really is, what's the future for *all* of these giant IT empires?
A snippet from The Week's US business pages caught my eye recently, reporting that for the first time ever the five most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization are precisely these US tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (ie. Google), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. The amount of US corporation tax they avoid every year and the trillions of dollars they have stashed in overseas tax havens would transform the Federal budget if repatriated and taxed properly, providing on an ongoing basis enough to reform both the US health and educational systems. They all have turnovers comparable to the GDPs of many small countries. They possess competences that would be invaluable if applied to government. They are, in many respects, like mini-states themselves, the most notable missing component being that they don't have armies. This being the case, my extensive reading (especially of Machiavelli and Hobbes) suggests that the real state, that is the US Federal Government, cannot forever tolerate their current behaviour, nor resist the rich pickings that they flaunt. Sooner or later they'll cross some invisible line - Apple nearly got there by refusing the FBI request to crack that terrorist iPhone - a serious confrontation will arise, and they will discover what all such aristocracies throughout history have eventually learned, namely that you really do need an army. I don't pretend to know when or how it will happen, or with what result. I'm 71, I'll just keep using Google anyway...
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