Google Data Liberation Group Seeks To Unlock Data 167
Several sources are reporting that The Data Liberation Front, a new engineering group within Google, is trying make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. They have already "liberated" about half of Google's offerings (including Blogger and Gmail) and have plans to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs in the near future. "In a blog post this morning, Data Liberation engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick, uses a good analogy to explain why the company sees this is an important step: 'Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all. Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective.'"
Your world delivered... (Score:1, Insightful)
to the NSA!
Bad analogy (Score:1, Insightful)
Data Liberation engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick, uses a good analogy ... you cannot take all of your things with you
This a bad analogy. When you move your stuff out of your apartment, you are actually removing the stuff - not making copies. With Google The Evil (tm), you have no guarantee that they haven't stashed a "backup" somewhere in their dark recesses. You don't really take your stuff, you just make a copy.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
You should. If you are not jealous and trust her, she'll feel more "free" in the relationship and stay with you. On the other hand, if you keep watching her and always remind her that she's yours, she'll get away.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't the saying goes something like "The harder you squeeze, the more will slip through your fingers..."?
So yes, in theory is will make people more likely to stay with Google. No fear of being locked means you don't look for a way out, which is a problem for Microsoft right now.
Re:Interesting atitude, "Anti-lockin"... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have a HUGE upside to helping people move their data out of Exchange servers (emails, contacts, appointments, etc) into the paid Google Apps service.. Last time I looked, their tools for doing just this were coming along nicely. That was one of the biggest complaints, getting the email and archives out. This same thing was a big pain, when MS wanted people to migrate from Groupwise and Lotus Notes to Exchange. MS made a nice little importer, but they didn't make their data easy to Export.
That can lead to very tempting sales pitches, give us 6 months, (or a year, or whatever) and if you don't like our service, we'll help you go right back to what you had before.
Mistaken analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't he mean, "You wouldn't choose to enter into that lease in the first place."
I.e. people won't use Google products until they can avoid lock-in.
Re:Bad analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
The analogy, as with most analogies, is useful for precisely the things it was designed to be useful for, and is misleading when extended.
There is a legitimate fear of Google's tools that you can't apply any other tools to your data. These guys are trying to fix that problem.
There is another legitimate fear that you can't delete your data for certain and ever. That's Somebody Else's Problem, and also not covered by the analogy.
Analogies can be useful to explain things, but they're rarely valid for actually proving things. They're useful for proofs only when the analogy is so precise that it's no easier to understand or manipulate than the original thing.
Re:interesting analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think often people confuse "altruism" with "long term self-interest," and that may be the issue Google is considering here. In the short term, you can make it hard for tenants to move out, and maybe gain a little bit of rent that you would not have otherwise gotten. However, people talk and, in the long term, behavior like that can lose you potential customers. You will be forced to drop your rent in order to keep your units full.
(This relates to the best description of "business ethics" I've heard: Ethical business requires that you balance the needs of and try to act in the best interest of your owners, employees and customers. Otherwise, in the long run, you will find yourself without capital, labor, or revenue. Thus, business ethics is about long term self-interest, not some kind of abstract altruism. Sometimes the "long run" takes a really long time, encouraging people to risk unethical behavior, of course.)
Making it easier to leave Google applications helps grow your potential customer base in the future (such as those who are wary of lock in), at the risk of losing current customers who are unhappy with your service. That is a motivation well-rooted in self-interest, as long as you think your product is better than everyone else's.
Re:interesting analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
It reduces the competitive moat yes. BUT it also give people more incentive to try your product. "Hey, if it doesn't work out you're not locked in. so why not START with us and if you're ever unhappy then you can move on.". The best next step for them is to make it really easy to get your data into their product line from their competitors. Like that guy upthread who was trying to extract 1.5k contact cards from AOL, for example.
This is good press for them on multiple levels.
Re:Bad analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an excellent idea on google's part. It's like that old IT truism whereby the more necessary a programmer becomes, the sooner you should get rid of him.
It could help small businesses and organizations decide to go with google, if they have guarantee of local backups as well. Nothing is more annoying than being able to put data in, but not getting it out in any timely, consistent fashion - which is the failure of many web-based solutions. Especially as Google is aiming to have all the productivity tools on the web - email, web, documents, etc.
Obligatory car analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If Microsoft did this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand (no pun intended), if you completely open your hands, the butterfly will simply fly away.
As always, the solution lies in the middle: you should neither squeeze nor open your hands, but simply hold it gently :-P
Coming back to the topic. Being possible do leave will make more people willing to get-in in the first place
It's a *perferct* analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you take out your stuff, they may keep a copy.
The leased apartment is a perfect analogy in this respect. No one can be sure that the landlord didn't use his master key when you were away and took pictures of all your stuff. Maybe he has his own apartment decorated exactly like yours.
But why should he? Unless you are a world-famous interior decorator, what reason would anyone have to copy your layout? Likewise, what incentive does Google have to keep copies of your data? They may keep information about you, for statistics, just like a marketing researcher may look into your trash can to see what products you buy, but that's not such a big deal.
I think people are too nervous about the assumed value of their on-line data. Think of how much data about you was public long before home computers existed. Your phone number and address are written in a book that's given for free to everyone who has a telephone. You carry a plate with a unique id code on the outside of your car. Every cheque you use to pay something has your signature and bank account number. All these items can and *have* been used by fraudsters in the past. Why should we get more nervous just because the data is in a digital format?
Re:Most important use case missing (Score:4, Insightful)
If Google gives you the tools to export your data on demand (which is what most of this amounts to, on the export side), then you can decide how frequently you want to archive it to protect against that kind of eventuality, just as you would with local storage. Yes, you run some risk of catastrophic, no-warning failure/cancelation of Google as a whole or the particular service, but you do that with most forms of storage under your own control as well, and, in either case, you can backup your data to mitigate the risk.
That seems to require accepting a particularly odd definition of "when you least need to".
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google Pervasiveness Front (Score:3, Insightful)
While this is a valid concern, you can take it too far. As a private citizen, it doesn't really bother me that Google crawls my email and my contacts' email and uses keywords to target ads. As a business, it would be more concerning, but even then only for certain types of data.
At the end of the day, they provide a service and need to be paid. They get paid through targeted ads - so if you don't want to see targeted ads, you're not "paying" Google, and why should they do things for you then?
It would be "evil" if they weren't up front about it or denied it - but data mining is Google's primary business, and they aren't hiding it. I've yet to see any instance of them declaring data sacred and then parsing it for their own purposes, either.
In short, I see no evidence that Google is "evil" - merely that they aren't doing things the way that a lot of F/OSS folks would prefer. They aren't making their money off support though, so that's expected.
Re:Interesting atitude, "Anti-lockin"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Its interesting that Google believes that they can compete enough on quality that lock-in is no longer an advantage to them because it scares away more potential customers than it traps.
With the rise of strong or at least credible competition from many open source products and a greater user awareness (although still not universal) of the perils of lock-in, the use of lock-in as a strategy by proprietary software vendors is becoming progressively less valuable. In fact, a tipping point may already have been reached whereby, as you stated, the number or users entrapped is not outweighed by the number of users scared away by the trap. This is a good thing for both consumers and the marketplace because it removes or lessens the impact of a classic barrier to entry in the software business. Google is wise to recognize and exploit this against other large competitors, such as Microsoft and Autodesk (which is infamous for their proprietary file format lock-in on their AutoCAD products), that have historically favored lock-in or at least done little or nothing to facilitate interoperability.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've met plenty of women who love the jealousy and control.
I call those chicks "women I don't want to date."