Note to Google Enterprise: Don’t Get Out Much, do you?

By James Governor on January 13, 2010

The idea of a cloud drive or folder in the sky is obviously a good one. We’ve been waiting for how long for the fabled gDrive? As a Google Enterprise customer I am glad to know I can now upload any kind of file, up to 250MB, into my account. Very handy. But the use case on the Official Google Enterprise blog post announcing the news reads like, well, its like the cloud never happened.

Let’s say you’re about to make a very important presentation to a prospective client on the other side of the country. Before you depart on your business trip, you download all of your presentation materials and InDesign® hand-outs onto your trusty thumbdrive. Just in case, you also email the files to yourself.

But while you’re in the air, your colleagues back at the office are making last minute edits to the files and your copies are now out of date. Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.

Sound familiar? The good news is that things are about to become a whole lot easier.

What? No that really doesn’t sound familiar. RedMonk uses Google Docs so we don’t worry about this kind of thing. As my coworker James Stewart commented:

“Its like their own products never happened“.

Replacing the Thumb Drive? The cloud already did that.

“Worse yet, when you arrive at your destination, you realize you left your thumbdrive at home.” AINT GONNA HAPPEN. Road warriors have laptops. Its what they do. Failing that they have iPhones, or, dare I say it… Android Phones. Really, who leaves for a business trip carrying nothing but a USB stick?

I can only assume the Google Enterprise team is so tightly ensconced in the GooglePlex that they aren’t used to the workaday scenarios the rest of us are. The post certainly made me chuckle this morning.

Tools for automatic file migration and syncing between multiple folders and devices? Now *that* is a use case. See DropBox, Mozy Sugarsync etc. I want Google to offer me the Synchronised Web, not a USB stick replacement.