I love your fan page! So what is it you do?

I laugh when I hear these kinds of statements because they remind me that it is a busy world we live in and communication is, in my humble opinion, one of its biggest problems!  So to risk over-communicating I am about to tell you what it is we do as if you were at the same lunch appointment I was today.

She said, “I love your fan page! So what is it you do?”

I said, “Cloud computing. It’s like this.  Where you work now everyone, I am guessing has their own computer, right?”

Her, “yes…”

Me, “…and do you back up your files?”

Her, “Yes, on an external hard drive.”

Me, “Supposing you all (they have around 10 employees) have documents / files you want to have in common – how do you do that?”

Her, “We were thinking of buying something like… well…it rhymes with

“…soft …change” 😉

Me “You could do that, but then each person will need a somewhat expensive license.  And then you would need to wait for each new release with all the latest and greatest updates.  Not to mention managing bug fixes, etc… intermittently as they are available, right?”

Her, “Isn’t everything like that?”

Me, “Nope. With Cloud Computing all your ‘stuff’ lives in the Cloud.  Say, for example, you go with Google for Business and Gmail™ webmail service.  When you do, you get gmail – which, of course, anyone can get for free as is.  But with Gmail for Business you have everything under your own domain instead of @gmail.com.  Far more professional.  Google’s filters are among THE most powerful in the world. But the best part is all they release updates on a regular basis.  It’s like everyday is your Birthday – you wake up and you have new features that you don’t have to pay extra for, don’t have to download, or install, or debug on everyone’s machine! Not to mention the storage, apps and powerful collaboration tools you get with that!”

Her, “Collaboration?”

Me, “Yeah, say you and ‘Susan’ are drafting a proposal but she works from another office, say, her home.  That proposal “lives” in Google Docs and you can see edits real time as the work is happening.  Google Talk™  allows you to talk while editing, and then you can share that doc with anyone you like and similarly “unshare” as needed.”

(As you can guess, the conversation didn’t end there…stay tuned for part 2 – either a tag on to this post, or another post)