The Cloud is a Scary Place to Do Business

Over the summer I decided to try to move my whole operation online. Listen to me, like I am Microsoft or something. What I mean is I wanted to be able to work anywhere, on any machine.

That is where the cloud comes in to play. Email, calendar, blogging, the whole kit and caboodle. So around mid-July I moved all my email addresses to Gmail. Now, I have 200 email addresses so it’s a bit of a process. Yeah, I know…why do I have 200 email addresses?

I have 200 websites that do all kinds of things. Sales, training, education, and so on. They run the gamut. So there is a bit of work to do to manage those entirely online. But once you forward them to one email, you really only have to worry about one email.

Then you’ve got all of your appointments that need to get moved over to the cloud. I use Google calendar for this. Then there’s WordPress, Google Docs, so on and so on. There I was all those summer nights moving .doc files and Excel spreadsheets over to Google Docs. By early August, I had cleaned up my hard drive and my year old Dell was flying again.

But things never seemed quite right. There were always little things here and there that became a nuisance. Nothing I couldn’t live with, but it was annoying.

Then Gmail went down a couple times and Calendar provided a few hiccups that were fairly costly. For the record, Firefox doesn’t play as well with Google Calendar as IE7 does. Good to know when you have a deadline that you put on the calendar one day and it was gone the next.

What’s all this mean?

I started to yearn for the days of yore. You know, Microsoft Office. There, I said it. Every so often I would open Outlook and just poke around to make sure I didn’t miss something and find myself missing it. Then I would subconsciously open a spreadsheet with Excel instead of Docs and get that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you put on that worn out sweatshirt in fall.

So, on the cusp of another football season, I am taking a technological step backwards. I am running back to the loving arms of Microsoft Office. Ah, the smell of my Dell’s fans working overtime to grind out a spreadsheet, the annoying closing of a Word doc before saving….feels like home again!