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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem?

Yeah.. see, I don't think the author has thought their cunning plan all the way through.

I understand the anti-google sentiment is at an all time high after the Reader shutdown fiasco, but let's stay rational, here!

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What about Google shutting down the open standard for syncing contact and calendar data across platforms?

I don't ask this as a form of "anti-Google sentiment," but as a legitimate question. The announcement that they would be phasing out ActiveSync support at the end of last year coupled with the announcement just made that they were doing the same for CalDAV/CardDav (when they announced the end of Reader) indicate they're "silo-ing" the service somewhat. Unless I've missed something, it's still not clear that iOS/iCal calendars are going to sync with Google's unless they "whitelist" Apple.

It's not a "cunning plan," it's self-preservation and keeping your stuff working or at the least not being at the mercy of a commercial concern who demonstrates a willingness to break it even for paying customers.

Just move it when/if they shutdown the service? It's not like they are going to suddenly shutdown the service or remove your ability to export contacts.

>It's not a "cunning plan," it's self-preservation

Fair enough, and I can see the value in keeping a local backup just for redundancy and convenience purposes (being locked out of my Google account for whatever reason would suck), but using it as your daily driver? Ehhhhhhh....

As far as shutdown fears, though? Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail are the core-est of the core products. They're tied directly into the Android ecosystem as well. Reader was more or less a niche product.

Google isn't going to shut down any of the holy three applications which make up the entire backbone of their mobile OS's PIM functionality. Any such fears are completely irrational.

I didn't say anything about them shutting down the services, I said they were "silo-ing" them and clearly moving away from having them interoperate with 3rd party software.

It is not at all irrational to worry for how long your enterprise users' contacts and calendars will continue to sync.

They've thrown us a lifeline for the time being and even appear to be working on a fix for Outlook 2013 so it will sync (it doesn't as of right now), but the whole process of sunsetting support for ActiveSync then CalDAV completely tips their hand that they want to control who and what interoperates with it - and for how much longer it will interoperate with platforms beside their own

Android core PIM suite =| the entire mobile and desktop universe. There are people paying for Google's enterprise apps offering that don't use Android. What is in question is for how long core services of those apps will work outside of a browser/Android device.

I barely use Calendar or Contacts. I only use Gmail for the mail -- something everything else can do, too, and it's a far cry to call gmail something impressive. By web dev standards, it's a fairly basic application.

When I got my n7, I considered Reader to be the core of the core of the core of that device. As soon as I powered it up, I was on Reader instantly reading new posts from tens of blogs I like to follow. I wasn't interested in the magazines they wanted to throw at me because immediate digital publishing has pretty much killed the magazine/newspaper industry. So for me, reading news and tech articles on my Android device WAS Reader. That's a HUGE part of why the device was purchased.

Do I use it to gmail? No, maybe to read mail, but not to respond to it because typing more than a paragraph on a touch interface is maddening. Do I use it to sync contacts? No, it's not a social device for me. Do I use it to do calendary stuff? No, I do that on my phone, so syncing both of those are turned off. The device is a web browser, game console, and news consumption engine. What drove those were Chrome, the app store, and Reader. One would think those things would be held up by Google as core parts of the platform, but maybe they want to push their own news web portal and Currents. Who knows.

Are you really sure about calendar being a core product?

Because the userbase size (without knowing what it actually is) probably isn't all too different from that of reader.

It will probably be around forever as a part of google apps, but the free calendar for everybody might eventually face the chopping block.

As part of google apps, it's a mediocre solution. It's not good for collaborating with people outside your organization (clients, patients, whatever else ends in -ients) but it's just good enough to prevent me from going with a hosted Exchange solution or to go back to administering our own infrastructure. I suspect it's prioritized to remain at that level.

Google moving away from open standards is a current popular opinion in bologsphere. Google has always made it super easy to take away your data. So, if you are not happy with a company than just don't take their services.

It's not an opinion. In the case of WebDAV, they are, in fact, moving away from open standards. It's also not about data export - it's about making commitments to businesses that pay for these services under contract and in conjunction with software that may or may not work with the apps in future.

You mean Caldav not webdav correct?

Correct. I meant CalDAV/CardDAV by extension.

You also have to realize that nothing can be committed forever. I don't really subscribe to doomsday warnings. Open Standards is an idea and not Google's corporate policy. It will prevail as long as 'the people' care for open standards.

Calendaring is a big issue in enterprises, especially when you have Apple, Google and Microsoft devices with all separate calendar apps.

Many organizations, very large ones in fact, are interested in moving away from exchange as their mail platform and going with Gmail. However, the gripe is that calendaring with Gmail is simply utterly broken. iOS devices dont get updates, creating resources is a complete joke (if anyone at google reads this; whomever designed the method for implementing resources in gmail/ical should be fired, and stripped of their ability to code ANYTHING).

At the same time - companies are looking for greater integration with their calendars and resources and devices etc...

What would be ideal - is a standard calendar blob which any view can access via an agreed protocol (maybe caldav is supposed to be this - but from the way resources are created/accessible/scheduled, its broken).

The next layer that everyone I have been working with over the last two years is looking for is "my location as it relates to the resources I am attempting to use"

Things like wayfinding, occupancy, meeting-start-based-on-presence, issue reporting etc... are just some of the features people are looking to add to the calendar systems.

None of this will be possible if Google is willy-nilly changing what they do, support, implement etc..

The sad thing is that for core business services Google seems to be running away terrified - and I suspect this is due to their inability to understand customer support.

I only skimmed the article. But I agree with your worry that this looks to be instructions that could put anyone who follows them at even higher risk of pain. The aesthetic of the web site doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the quality of the tools being promoted.

That said, I suspect a key point the author would make in response to our concern is that we can vigorously backup the server hosting our contacts and calendar when we host these ourselves. In fact, this point is precisely why I host so much of my own stuff: I can manage how data is handled. Synchronization notoriously sucks, and if some synchronization failure causes many records to suddenly vanish, it would be easier to restore those records from a self-maintained server than to plead with Google's support. I wouldn't know the first thing about recovering synchronization-scrubbed records from the devices themselves (e.g., an Android phone).

I suppose it would attack your point about "better backup" by asking what value that backup has if you can't easily leverage it to restore on demand.

Still, I feel your points about quality, redundancy, and uptime could not be easily countered.

> The aesthetic of the web site doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the quality of the tools being promoted.

Have you ever fired any of Oracle Corp setup/installers?

Touché. Those are awful. I'd say Oracle should be ashamed, but I'm sure Larry Ellison is feeling really bad about himself in between counting stacks of money.

Oracle installers aren't meant to be pretty, but rather practical, they are run mostly by IT professions who know what they are doing. Remember an Enterprise solution has to conform to ADA in 57 different countries and be fully translated, must work on version current-15, must work on lynx, IE5, csh, bash, ksh, windows 31, osx and vms :)

your convenience is pretty low on their priority list...

No, the enterprise solution means it can run only on versions ancient-x, ancient-y, and ancient-z of these OSes on approved hardware and must use this JVM and accept applets and plugins. :-)

This is what happens when the buyer is not the user.

No, the loss of contacts happened for the first time about 3 years ago and has repeated roughly every 6 months.

I don't understand why you think that Google have a better backup service than I can provide myself. I could backup my DB once per hour if I wanted.

I am not anti Google but if a better service can be run from my own server then of course I will use it.

So you think your hard drive is more reliable than a Google Data Center?

No, but I suspect I care more deeply about my own data than Google do.

I'm sure Google quite loves your data.

But if they lose it, do they care? It's one drop in the bucket of their analytics. The incentives I have to preserve my data are greater than the incentives they have.

On their side, they have some very bright minds and some very deep pockets, as well as a proven infrastructure. But if they lose my data, they lose some analytics which may cost them pennies or perhaps dollars of ad revenue.

On my side, I have myself and whatever advice I can cobble together from friends and the Internet, a reasonable salary, and the occasional hour or two of spare time. But if I lose my data, I lose over a decade of accumulated emails and contact information.

I will gladly allow Google to back up my data (I use gmail to archive my call logs and SMS messages right now, in fact!), but I would rather be in control of the primary copy myself.

> The incentives I have to preserve my data are greater than the incentives they have.

If you lose your data, you lose your data. If Google loses your data, they probably lost that of others too, and they make the evening news.

Apparently not, since they've been losing OPs contacts for years (assuming the article is correct) and haven't made the news about it yet.

I agree about moving contacts and calendar off Google myself. To be honest, if it's not actually somewhere you control, it's not yours.

At least if you host or manage it yourself, you are only at the mercy of your own incompetence, whereas the cloud's competence is usually not something you can determine or anticipate regardless of SLA's and architecture. This gets demonstrated regularly if you watch the front page of this site :)

I still use text files, a VCS and a couple of editor wrapper scripts as I have for at least 20 years to solve the calendar and contacts problem.

I agree with your sentiment:

Honestly, is there anything that matches Google search quality of services? Is there any email hosting, paid or not, that is as feature rich as Gmail? What about online documents? Calendars and contacts? What about all the other little things I get, like Gtalk or Google hangouts?

Honestly, if there was any alternative that covered all of these with the quality of Googles services, I'd switch in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay $30+ a month for them all.

Actually, if anyone has recommendations, I'd love to hear them!

Bing isn't as good as google yet, but its reached the threshold of good enough. Hosted Exchange email is very feature rich. I pay outlook.com 5 per month and get wonderful integration with all my devices for calander, contacts, and ToDo. Gtalk is hard to replace because your friends use it. I use apples messages and it works fine with people on gtalk.

For my core functioms, outlook.com is head and shoulders better. People have probably just gotten used to how utter shit the gmail UI has become, but outlook.com is refreshingly well designed (the web client). And activesync support is of course killer.

At least it will probably prevent Google-caused privacy disasters like this from happening:

http://lee-phillips.org/gcaldisaster/

Data corruption is unforgivable. My bank might have have better accountants, stronger safes, great hours, terrific customer service and round-the-clock security, but you can bet that if they randomly lost my money on a regular basis (or even once?) that I'd withdraw it and stuff it in my mattress until I found a better alternative.

The idea doesn't make sense for most, but it's a nice, simple set of instructions if you wanted to do it.

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