Living in the cloud with Google & co
On April Fools Day of 2004, Google announced that they were going to create an email service called "Gmail". The real shocker, though, was that they planned to offer an entire gigabyte of storage to every user, at no charge. Internet users everywhere were understandably skeptical; competitors such as Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail offered between 2 and 4 MB to each user. When Google later raised the storage capacity from 1 gigabyte to 2, they showed the world that they meant business.
Google has realized for a long time that the future of the internet lies on the internet, not on platform-dependent desktop applications like Microsoft Office. Since taking a stand with Gmail, Google has further challenged the status quo by releasing an impressive slew of online products such as Google Calendar, Google Reader, and, my favorite, Google Docs.
Google Docs is an online productivity suite, offering similar features to that of Microsoft Office. Almost anything you can do in Office you can do with Docs. Besides the standard features offered by any office suite such a word processing and presentation creation, Docs lets you do so much more:
- Put it all online. Since Google Docs is a web service, everything you create with it is stored up in the cloud. You don't have to worry about accidentally losing it from theft, viruses, hard drive failure, or anything else, plus you can access it anywhere, including from a phone. It's all stored with Google, so you know it's safe.
- Remember the time. Every time you make a change to one of your documents, be it a text document, presentation, or spreadsheet, a backup is automagically made for you. For the people who like to press the delete key one too many times, this is for you.
- How do I look? One of my favorite benefits to storing everything online is that you can easily collaborate with others. Once you've shared a document with someone else, they can access it from anywhere in the world and make changes, comments, or notes. I don't think I can explain it any better than Google has:
Why Google should refuse to censor in China
A man stands before a line of Chinese tanks in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
On April 14th, 1989, a group of students gathered at Tiananmen Square in Beijing to honor the death of government reform advocate Hu Yaobang. They called for political and economical reform, including a free and independent mass media. The government refused, and instead said they would speak with government-designated student representatives. Students involved in the protests went on hunger strikes, and refused to leave the square. On June 20th, martial law was declared. Two weeks later, tank-backed forces began to open fire into the crowd of peacefully protesting students at the square. Even those attempting to flee were shot down or beaten.
The picture above is one of the only images of the massacre. The Chinese media wasn't allowed to report on the event.
If you do a search from Google's Chinese site for "Tiananmen Square" (in Chinese, mind you), you won't see a single mention of the massacre. Further search refinement uncovers sites dismissing the supposed protests as "rumors" and "myths". A similar search using the US Google site gives you the results you would expect, such as an excellent Wikipedia article about the protests.
I bring up the topic of Chinese censorship because of recent events. China's government was found to have executed targeted cyber attacks toward a variety of industries and services, including Google's Gmail. The goal of the attacks on Google was to break into the mail accounts of several well-known political activists.
From Google's statement on their company blog:
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
This is a huge deal for Google. China, which has approximately 1.3 billion people, is home to nearly a fifth of the world's population. Google's not a stupid company. They realize that refusing to continue censoring their search results will probably get them kicked out of China. They also realize that by making a public announcement of their plans, they're placing China in a defensive position. Protesting students may not be able to force the largest nation in the world to change its ways, but when the largest internet company in the world takes a stand, things can change. Let's say that Google and China don't reach an agreement that will allow Google to stay in China. No one in China can access Google. It's very likely that they also won't be able to access Gmail. Or Chrome. Or Google Earth. Or any of Google's services.
I don't know many Chinese people, but I'd be willing to bet they won't be too happy about losing the things they use daily.
Once it becomes a trend for companies to refuse doing business in China (as opposed to bending over backwards to be in China), we may start to see some change for this dated government system. Google has recognized that we really are a city on a hill, a culture by which others will model themselves on. Censorship, especially limiting or controlling the press, shouldn't be tolerated in this 21st century.
A pat on the back for Google.