I am for free enterprise and if someone provides a superior product, then the market should reward them. Google certainly has responded to a market need, in a variety of niches, however, the more areas they go and the more data they suck into the huge data centers, the more they can abuse that power.

This has become of particular concern for me lately.

At my current position, I was running out of mail server space (we outsource it) and I am on two machines, and so IMAP made more sense for me than POP on each. But I couldn’t keep the messages on our server, so I looked around. GMail became my choice, simply because they allow FREE IMAP access and will store (currently) at least 6 GB of data. I have long used Yahoo for webmail, but they charge for IMAP. So I am now using GMail, happily, and didn’t even notice the outage the other day, because I don’t use the web interface AT ALL. Also, it does a Blackberry app, which is nice. My only question is, what does Google get out of this arrangement? I don’t use the web app, so never see the ads, so how are they going to monetize me?

The other area we are using Google now is for their spreadsheet app, because it was so much easier to share documents with others, than me building a new web app for some internal use (although it has given me a great chance to prototype different PHP/AJAX grid frameworks). They already had built some cool little AJAX toys into it, so let them deal with the hassle. But again, how will they monetize this in the future?

I can’t imagine they are just giving me all this bandwidth and disk space (regardless how cheap it is now), just out of some techy-altruism, there is a profit motive in there somewhere! My only conclusion I can reach is that the more I am dependent on them in any one arena, the more likely I am to use them in others and they have already figured out how to monetize many of those areas. So again, I ask, is really a “GOOG-opoly” any better than any other monopoly. We become so dependent on one company, that the opportunity for abuse, may just be too much to resist, regardless of the oft-professed “DO NO EVIL” mantra.

Anyhow, I did want to mention why I have been so busy and haven’t posted and also follow up on a previous post.

• First, the previous post about InstallShield and error 1327.  I was looking at the blog’s logs and have gotten a few hits to this post, so I must not be the only one having this issue. It continues to be a problem, and probably will be for a while, since people will use the version of InstallShield for a while, even after they come out with a new one that fixes the issue (which hopefully they will do soon). Of course, the new install pain is for Quicktime. I now have to register and then unregister VBscript.dll every time I load a new version, and Apple is aware of the issue, but of course they haven’t corrected it and you can’t blame this one Vista, you MS haters!

• Secondly, what I have been up to is working on learning Visual Studio at work so I can work on ASP to complement our new ERP program we have.  I have been doing PHP programming for a few years now, and have used Macromedia’s (nee’ Adobe) Dreamweaver for almost 10 years for all my design and development. So using a new IDE is a bit daunting, and interesting to read all the back and forth between the two and their camps. So far best I can determine is that Dreamweaver is not particularly ASP-friendly, but that VS is not a great designer interface.

But I guess both sides knew this, because Adobe hasn’t put a lot into ASP, I guess they figure if you are a MS shop, you will use VS. And Microsoft has answered the designer complaint with their Expression line, which I have only used to play with once. The crappy part for me, is that in my position, I will continue to have to use both, since MS doesn’t do PHP development (although they have opened up to do MySQL work) and Adobe hasn’t improved ASP support with CS3 from what I can tell.

I will be curious to see what VS 2008 has in it, since MS said Beta 2 that was released this week had some of the design and CSS improvements that came from the Expression Web product. Hopefully, I will know by the end of this week, since I actually think I have learned enough C# to actually do some real coding this week in ASP.

As you can tell I am excited about this development.

Get the plug-in here.