Here's my editor's note from the May 7 issue of Capital Business, the Washington Post's local business weekly:
By Dan Beyers
I had a moment of panic last week when my Google Docs account suddenly became part of something called Google Drive.
Google Drive, I gather, is supposed to be the new brand name for
the online giant’s file cabinet in the cloud, its answer to Apple’s
iCloud, Microsoft’s SkyDrive and independent services such as Dropbox.
I
was eager to give it a try. Except when I fired up my account the files
I use nearly every day were no longer where I left them. That sent me
scurrying through strange menus, praying I had not lost my valuable
intellectual property.
I eventually located my errant spreadsheets
but the brief helplessness I experienced reminded me of those bad old
days when my first hard drive crashed, taking with it many precious
bits and bytes.
Will I never learn?!
Few things are more
unsettling to me than to have something go missing. In my household, I’m
the person everyone calls to find that which is lost. I have a knack
for discovery, though truth be told, my secret is that I’m a creature of
habit and routine. When something disappears it is inevitably because
someone has deviated from the norm.
The thing I’m learning about
the online world is that the pattern never stays fixed. One day my files
might be in alphabetical order, the next they show up chronologically,
or not at all.
And it is not just Google. Facebook and countless
other sites can’t seem to stop tinkering with their interfaces, often
without much warning to their users.
The stakes are even larger if
your business is somehow tied to your interaction with those digital
entities. It’s easy to find your enterprise untethered when an update is
pushed through, necessitating an urgent call to the IT department: Who
broke the Internet?
Some company is going to make a lot of money solving this pain point in the new world of cloud computing.
But until it does, I’m backing up my stuff.