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Hi, I'm Jez. Welcome to my blog, where I talk about learning, teaching and educational technology.
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Hmm….I love google for all it does so effectively but I really want to see a strong competitor here else it surely will lead to problems in future. Over dependence is lethal. As you rightly said, everyone (not only students) use emails nowadays like breathing, once you control something as vital as that, without any threats, dangerous. For example Gazprom.
Hi AC, thanks for stopping by. I agree, overdependence is a big danger, and I hope CICS negotiate a favourable contract with a good service level agreement to provide some level of protection. There’s always a risk associated with outsourcing and going with a massive player like Google, particularly for such a central service as email, has both advantages and disadvantages.
In a more general sense, I think Google is starting to recognise that it can’t continue to be successful by owning the whole internet: it’s whole business model is based on trust and as they head towards. I think it’s interesting that syndication is a cornerstone of Google Wave. Since it’s an open protocol, you can build your own server, and base it on Google’s open source codebase or not as you wish. No dependence on Google. If Wave succeeds, it will be a big win for generous, open business practices. If not, it will have been an interesting experiment and hopefully we’ll learn a lot from it.