I forget which episode we’re on of why we aren’t Google, but it’s certainly the umpteenth.

When I started working for OpenSure the phrase “Google Docs” began to haunt my dreams, as that seemed to be the best analogy people could find for what we do but no, so no. The crucial different between us and Google, or any other megacorp hosting and/or cloud services company, is that we don’t decide how YOU use YOUR data. It’s yours, use it how you like, please. No really, we insist.

I’ve just been reading that Google is going to kill offline access to Gmail via Chrome. Ah shoot (no, I’m not American, but Google is). In fact, as this article explains:

On Tuesday, Gmail dropped offline support for Chrome, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), Firefox 4, Safari and Opera.

So there you have it. It goes on to say:

Until Google restores offline support to Gmail with HTML5 this summer, Google recommended that users switch to IE8 or Firefox 3.6, versions that have been supplanted by IE9 and Firefox 4, respectively.

And what bothers me even more is that when offline access is restored, it will be via Google’s own ‘Gmail Offline Chrome Web app’. I find it disturbing that Google is being so controlling over how its users use their own email. It doesn’t have to be like this. If you’d like to be the one wielding control over your data, systems such as ours place that control into your hands. We provide the servers, you make the choices about when, where and how with the data. Isn’t that how it should be?