Saturday, September 14, 2013

Battle of the Ecosystems

This humble blog has used Blogger, Google's free blogging and hosting service, for the past ten years. We are also regular users of other free Google applications, gmail, Maps, Calendar, and the Chrome browser, to name but a few. However, we're not monogamous: our hardware is mostly Apple, plus a few legacy PC's for business, and we admit that we're dependent on Apple's App store, iOS, iCal, iCloud, iTunes, and other "i"-services to make it through the day.

We haven't been posting to this blog all week because there's been a glitch in Blogger that won't let us log in. Obviously, a workaround surfaced. Other users pointed to the solution: stop using Chrome, the default browser on our Macs and PCs, and switch to Firefox or Apple's Safari.

Becoming too dependent on one company's ecosystem is a recipe for disaster. (Going all-Apple is not the answer either: if you switched from Google to Apple Maps last year, you could have died.)

The ecosystems do talk to one another. For example, entries on the Google Calendar automatically show up on iCal, so all our devices are linked and sync'ed to a certain extent. It's becoming less necessary to choose sides, and for safety's sake we're not going to. In diversity there is strength. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

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