[simonsarris]

But Google has moved into that space! The general populace just didn't care too much.[1]

Chromebooks do exactly what he's describing right off the bat.

Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical.

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[1] I think part of the reason for this is that just as nobody wants to think about things like death, NOBODY wants to think about data loss and prevention. It's like death, but harder to understand and to the common folk most people aren't even aware that there are options in this sphere.

Even though a lot of people just use Facebook, email, IM and word processing, its going to be hard to convince them that something like a chromebook is a really good idea because the reasons its technically sweet are lost on them.

[pilif]

> Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical.

unless of course some algorithm at Google decided that you are a bot and/or spammer. At that point, all your Chromebooks are useless and all your data is gone without any way for you to get it back.

See the Amazon Kindle post from a cole of days ago.

Don't get me wrong. In general I love the idea of having my data somewhere in the cloud where somebody else is working on keeping it save. But in case of emergencies, I would love to have somebody to talk to who is willing (and able) to help me.

Unfortunately all services coming close to this vision are too big to be able to afford any customer support it seems.

[Evbn]

It is really a shame, bordering on suspicious, that Google Takeout doesn't include any approximately realtime sync APIs for maintaining an off-cloud copy of your life. Even at Microsoft's worst proprietary height, they could never delete your data.

[Joeri]

Why should you have to do that? Why can't google maintain proper backups? They could charge for it.

Of course, that means they would need to guarantee they will never, ever, cut you off from your data, not even if you defraud them. Under EU law they basically have a legal obligation to do that, but sadly they don't feel compelled to comply with their legal obligations without a court ordering them to.

By the way, if you've never had microsoft lose your data for you, you haven't been using their software for very long or been very very lucky. Admittedly, when microsoft did it they didn't mean to. Google and amazon mean to.

[89a]

Probably the last company I'd ever want in charge of my data is one like Google who allows companies run riot and delete data they don't even own on YouTube.

[sp332]

Setting up and email or IM client to save your emails and IMs is pretty easy. Google Drive has a desktop client that syncs some documents in real-time (although it excludes documents made in Google Docs itself). You can use Picasa to sync photos from Instant Upload (which is inexplicably not integrated with Google Drive yet). I think that just leaves music... did I miss anything?

[hexis]

Only in the Shuttleworthian sense of you already trust MSFT with your data.

[ryanstewart]

This may be a matter of semantics but it seemed to me he pretty clearly avoided the word "cloud" in favor of "the network".

Based on his post it seems like he's looking for something that's a bit more robust from an infrastructure standpoint than what most cloud offerings are today. Eg, not "stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh".

That appears to be one reason he's not buying that people have moved into the space.

[stevewilhelm]

I think the Chromebook missed the boat for consumers. If it had a 128GB SSD drive that automatically synched to Google Drive, then it would useful. Now it just doesn't work for photo, video, and music editing, as well as HD movie viewing on the road.

In its current configuration, it's an anemic iPad with a keyboard.