Get Off Of My Cloud

I've had this back and forth relationship with Gmail and MobileMe, like a friend of mine who in high school kept bouncing back and forth between two girlfriends. Each girl had something appealing about her that the other lacked.

At first I was a big fan of Gmail because of it's unique approach to conversation threading and message archiving. But then after I got my iPhone in 2007 I couldn't stand being limited to POP access, so I switched to .Mac so that I could keep my inbox in sync with IMAP. Google addressed this shortcoming and offered IMAP for free, so I switched back.

Then in 2008 Apple relaunched .Mac as MobileMe and included push email notifications. This was appealing so I switched once again. Both times that I used MobileMe as my primary email address I continued to give out my Gmail address which I forwarded to my me.com address. This works pretty well but it is a source of confusion for some people who notice that I'm responding to them from a different address. They often send their messages to both and then I end up with two copies.

Google fired back by giving its users push messaging by implementing the ActiveSync protocol. I was tempted to switch again but initially choose to stick with MobileMe.

Then in October I felt it was prudent to start using a Windows machine at work while I was engaged at Microsoft, so I was forced to use MobileMe's Web interfaces (well I could have used Outlook, but that just didn't sit right with me). These Web interfaces look great in demos, but in practice they pale in comparison to the usefulness of Gmail and Google Calendar.

So I've switched again, hopefully for the last time.

I've fallen back in love with Gmail, and she hasn't been cruel in light of my infidelity. On the contrary, Gmail has gained some useful features like priority inbox and the ability to make phone calls from my Google Voice number. These are features that it will be difficult for Apple to match since they assume you're using Mail.app for email which only gets updated with Mac OS X every two years or so.

Google Calendar is also far better than its MobileMe doppelganger. Hell, after learning it's keyboard shortcuts I would say it is more usable than iCal. Plus it has more robust sharing features so Becky and I can stay in sync.

I never got much use out of iDisk and recently I've become a fan of Dropbox, which I really believe Google needs to buy.

The remaining feature that MobileMe had that did not have a free counterpart was Find My iPhone, and Apple recently decided to give that feature away for free. Even though I'm paid up on MobileMe until July, I have disabled automatic renewal as I have fully moved my life from Apple's cloud to Google's.

But don't get me wrong, you should expect a blizzard in hell before you should expect me to give up my Mac or my iPhone. The beauty of Google is that they don't care whose hardware or operating system you use as long as you use their Internet services and see their ads.