Filed under: Internet, Office, Web services, Google, Microsoft
Google says: "Take your data with you!"
Just say no to data lock-in! That's what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at San Francisco's Web 2.0 conference earlier this week. "If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users," Schmidt said. "The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better." He said that making it easy for users to leave at any time and take their data with them keeps the company on its toes, and that other software companies should adopt a similar policy. He also said that Google's ever-expanding corpus of web-based office programs isn't "an office suite" per se and that Google isn't trying to replace Microsoft's ubiquitous Office.
We've talked about data
lock-in before, that sorry state when a web service won't give you your data in a useful, standard format. del.icio.us,
I am happy to observe, is no such web service, and by way of proof I direct you to
After spending the better part of an hour on 