Google CEO — Take Your Data and Run

BobB writes to tell us that Google is promising to make the data they store for end users more portable and is urging other companies to do the same. From the article: "Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle, Eric Schmidt said at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco."

Comments

Difficult for more complex data?

[Salvance]

It's applaudable that Google is doing this, although not at all surprising. But most of the user data they store is pretty simple (spreadsheets, e-mails, etc.), so making it portable is relatively easy. This is far more difficult to do for real business data, like hosted CRM solutions (e.g. Salesforce). Google also doesn't have much to lose by making their data portable ... almost all their services are free, vs. Salesforce which has the potential to lose millions per year on some of their larger customes.

Re:Difficult for more complex data?

[chroot_james]

just because a service is given away for free does not mean it's not profitable. google has a lot to loose if people stop using their services...

Re:Difficult for more complex data?

[DragonWriter]

Google also doesn't have much to lose by making their data portable ... almost all their services are free, vs. Salesforce which has the potential to lose millions per year on some of their larger customes.

They don't stand as much to lose from any one customer leaving, but they face as much of a problem as anyone else if the same percentage of their customers choose to leave. What Google is gambling is that, if they have a good product, the reduction in the disincentive to give it a whirl that comes from people knowing up front that if they decide to leave, it will be painless will gain them more customers than easing out migration will lose them. And also that someone that has a good experience leaving one Google service may be more likely to try another Google service.

for the "omg you google fanboys" people

[bunions]

next time you post some nonsense about how "all the slashdot people idolize google for some reason," this would be a good example of why we like them.

Re:for the "omg you google fanboys" people

[Headcase88]

I certainly like Google but that's bullshit. Eric is tactful with his words; surely all of this data portability stuff has an additional purpose, like, say, helping bringing valuable data in to Google's services? MS Office is the incumbent here, so of course Google wants to make it easy to transfer data between MS Office and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, for example.

Not saying it's a bad thing, not saying Google isn't a great company, but I wouldn't take any claims made by x about how great x is at face value.

Re:Evolution hooks into Gmail would be sweet!

[Salvance]

Already does ... gmail has a POP3 server, so you can just download into Evolution (unless you want the actual GMail GUI in Evolution, which seems rather bizarre since the Evolution interface is already pretty "sweet").

Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[Kadin2048]

Actually, when I read this, I think it's aimed at Flickr.

Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums are basically similar services. Flickr is a much bigger and more mature service, but Google's has more features and offers more control -- in particular, it implements some features that folks on Flickr have been begging for, literally for years in some cases.

(For example, Web Albums lets you upload photos to an "unlisted" album, which you can then send out special invitation emails out from; only people with the special URL in the email can access the photos. Flickr provides no such method of control; either your photos are public and open to the world, or they're open only to specific Flickr members you designate as 'friends' or 'family.' Basically, if you want to share photos only with your family, Flickr wants you to sign them all up for Yahoo IDs and Flickr memberships. Yeah, right.)

But once you have a few hundred photos up on Flickr, it's difficult to migrate off of. If you have them all carefully organized in iPhoto or something, then maybe you can do it, but if you've uploaded a few photos from here, a few from there, scattered across a dozen computers or emailed from mobile phones, there's no easy way to extract everything and migrate it to a different service. You're basically stuck with Yahoo, and the longer you stay with them, the more photos you upload ... you can see where it goes. (Although, maybe there's some way you could come up with a shell script that would parse Flickr's URLs and download the full-resolution photos, and file them according to photosets and other information.)

If the data was more easily transferable, then people could migrate from one service to the next. As adoption of Google's Web Albums is hobbled directly by the difficulty of moving off of Flickr, I saw this as one possible interpretation of the article's meaning.

Re:Wonder if they were thinking of Flickr.

[dmd]

maybe there's some way you could come up with a shell script that would parse Flickr's URLs and download the full-resolution photos

"Maybe"?

Flickr is one of the most open and programmable sites out there. Check out http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ -- absolutely everything you can do at Flickr, you can do programatically.

There are thousands of third party utilities that operate over Flickr photos, including many that will download all your photos along with all the metadata. There's even a perl module for it, Net::Flickr::Backup.