Am I Doing Computing Wrong?

For almost as long as I can remember my north star of computing was, basically, what iCloud has become. I want my devices to meet me where I am with access to what I need when I need it.

Back in the 00’s I was an early user of apps like Dropbox and Spider Oak to allow me to sync work between various computers. It worked so well that I started looking at ways to ensure I could access all my data no matter where I was. If I was at home I wanted to work on my laptop. If I was in my office, at the time, I had an iMac I wanted to work on, etc.

I’ve spent so long chasing this paradigm that it has colored this blog and has, for better or for worse, tied me to either Apple or Google for nearly all my data and, as tech’s grip on our lives gets even worse, I’m once again questioning that setup.

I tried to leave Apple a few years ago, and wound up with all my data in Google. When I tried to leave Google I was able to access my own data but not the data I need to share with family or others. In general my quest to use all my devices as interfaces into a central store of my data, if you will, has been a quite an adventure.

Now am find myself asking whether this approach of accessing my data is still worth it. If I split it all up it might not matter what device I use. Could I be happy with that?

I have a lot of investigating to do into this in the coming months. We’ll see what happens.