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The Danger of Free Google Software

Without paying money for goods and services, customers have little recourse when a company decides to radically change its game plan. Is your data in danger of disappearing?
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What’s the Latest Development?

The newest free product from Google Labs, the Internet giant’s experimental software design department, is called Keep. The Android mobile app helps users to collect notes, photos, and info on their smartphones. There is a similar product called Evernote which, according to The Atlantic correspondent James Fallows, is both more powerful and more polished. The reason, suggests Fallows, is that the designers of Evernote sell their product, rather than give it away for free. Fallows, already a user of Evernote, has no intention of switching to Google’s product because, since it’s free, it can be scrapped at any time. 

What’s the Big Idea?

The allure of free Google products comes at a sizable cost, says Fallows. Without paying money for goods and services, customers have little recourse when a company decides to radically change its game plan. “After Reader’s demise, many people noted the danger of ever relying on a company’s free offerings. When a company is charging money for a product—as Evernote does for all above its most basic service, and same for Dropbox and SugarSync—Read it at The Atlantic

Photo credit: Shutterstock.com

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Guest Thinkers
Happy New Year
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
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