For years, the aim of pretty much every technology company has been to make a product that people can’t give up using, and in case something better comes along from a rival, make sure that they can’t get their stuff — whether it be data, software or hardware — to work easily with the newcomer’s platform. On this rested the success of the compact cassette versus the 8-track, VHS versus Betamax, Iomega’s Zip versus other backup systems and most recently Blu-ray versus HD DVD.
Amid these battles, Brian Fitzpatrick’s role at Google sounds contrary. He runs its self-styled (and half-jokingly named) “Data Liberation Front” in the Chicago offices, and his aim is to make it easier — one button is the ideal — to export your data from Google’s servers onto a storage format of your choice, whether that’s your own Web server, your computer, or the comfort of your backup drive.
The Data Liberation Front (http://bit.ly/googledata) — the name’s a jokey reference to the Judean People’s Front, the would-be terrorist group in Monty Python’s Life of Brian that never quite gets its act together — is actually a good thing for Google’s customers, Fitzpatrick argues, because it means that lock-in element can’t be applied to your data.
“Think of it like you were renting a house,” Fitzpatrick said. “If you decided to move out and the landlord came and told you that you couldn’t take your furniture or your clothes or your family photos, you wouldn’t be pleased, would you?”
His point is that Google wants to give you that comfortable feeling that if you need to export your data then you can.
It’s already been achieved for Blogger, the free blogging platform the company bought. There is a one-click export (to the Atom format) that preserves not only posts but also comments. (An export to RSS, which is also available, only preserves the blog posts.) Google Notebook, which has been “end of lifed” (read: killed off), has had export functionality added to it. Fitzpatrick notes all sorts of Google products that have received export functionality: Google Docs, iGoogle, and various other Google products. (And, inevitably, you can follow it on Twitter at twitter.com/dataliberation.)
And next, he says — though dates aren’t given — there’ll be an “export” button for Google Sites (in HTML), as well as a “mass export” from Google Docs, for those who want to export a lot of data at once.
You can see the clever sales logic. Many people fret that with cloud computing you can’t walk up to any location — still less a specific machine — and say: “My data is in here.”
TRUSTING CLOUDS
Such distributed services mean your data might be on five continents at the same time.
Thus people, and companies, get uncomfortable about trusting a cloud service, because they don’t know where it is, and so can’t be sure it’s really safe.
For Google to say “we can easily import your data” isn’t more of a claim than others are already making.
But if it then says “exporting your data is one-button easy,” it actually has a selling point. True, it looks perverse to those accustomed to the lock-in mentality of previous commercial battles. But it may be the right approach for the web. It’s classically, Google-typically, counter-intuitive.
Fitzpatrick studied Latin and Greek at university, then went to work for OnShore, a small networking company based in Chicago. There he got interested in fixing a problem with an open source database driver, and was then encouraged to submit the change to its authors. That led to working on Subversion, a version control system widely used by teams of programmers who need to co-ordinate different versions of programs.
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