I have to say that I am loving a lot of the things coming out of Google at the moment. I am using Google Chrome, which I love, and am spreading the word to others I know, most people love it more than anything they have used after about a day. It is light, super fast and in my experience super stable.
I am an avid user of Google Docs, mainly the spreadsheets – as you can share with others very easily. Calendar does not seem to be much use at the moment because I use Exchange at work for everything. Google finance would have to be the best site on the market for tracking shares all around the world. I use it daily to keep on top of things.
Then I decided to use Google Apps to manage all my mail for my domain after a recommendation from a friend. I was previously using my hosting server for mail and then using Gmail as the interface, however it was annoying when mail always went from your Gmail address on behalf of FletchCorp, not just FletchCorp.
Google apps now runs all my mail in a Gmail interface. I login via my own address, can add users in about 1 minute, share documents easily for these users all for free. They give me 7Gig of space which is more than enough and I can pay for more if I like.
However as good as this service is now I have two Google accounts, which quite frankly is very average. There is no merge accounts feature of any kind. Every Google site I use links settings to my Gmail account, I could not move my chat contacts, any of my documents or settings to the new account. I have to have two accounts instead of merging them and having one.
These are the same growing pains as Microsoft used to have (and still have in quite a few cases) but the thing that annoys me most is that Google are unresponsive to customers around their concerns. They say you will have to deal with it or are silent on the issue. If you are telling people you will handle all their hosting, calendar, contacts etc, you don’t want them to need to additional accounts to use the rest of your services. I wonder how long it will take?
Typically I am very cynical about Apple and their products, but they keep changing my mind.
This is one of the cleanest product demonstration videos I have ever seen. The thing that I like about it most is that it is so simple. I would really like an Iphone 3G S and am thinking about getting one based on this video! Sounds average but I have never seen another mobile phone that looks so cool and versatile in one video. The funny thing is that lots of other phones can do the same thing, but the cant sell like that for some reason..
This is one of my favourite videos around marketing mistakes, I know it is old, 2004 I believe, but it is still very relevant today. Microsoft actually commissioned this video which is a relief that they can see where they were going wrong.
